Steve Perry is riding high on the success of his comeback album, Traces, which is the former-Journey frontman’s first Top 10 solo debut. The album entered the Billboard 200 Albums Chartat Number Six; the Billboard Album Chart at Number Four; and the magazine’s Current Rock Album Chart at Number Two.
During a chat with Rolling Stone, Perry, who hasn’t toured since his 1994/1995 dates in support of his last solo set, For The Love Of Strange Medicine, said that although his road plans haven’t been solidified, it’s a sure bet if he tours, he’ll be taking his Journey classics with him: “I don’t know if a tour will happen. Right now it’s premature to even guess. But there would be no way in the world I’d go out there and not sing Journey music too. It would be solo and Journey together. But those songs are vocally challenging. They’re challenging for (current Journey frontman) Arnel (Pineda) and everyone else. They’re not easy. They were challenging for me when I wrote the damn melodies, but back then I was young and in my Olympic singer mode.(Barbra) Streisand lowers the keys when she does her old songs. There’s nothing wrong with lowering a key. We’re not spring chickens.”
When pressed about what he remembers about the songwriting sessions for Journey’s signature hit, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Perry recalled to Rolling Stone, “I know everyone has their own opinion about this. I don’t know what Jonathan (Cain) thinks, but I remember it starting out in a warehouse in Oakland where we had a rehearsal space. I suggested we needed something with eighths on the piano because I always liked songs that began like that. It flowed from there. We were all in the room. It was me, Jonathan and Neal (Schon). It was a true group effort. Then I went to Jonathan’s house and we wrote the lyrics together. There’s no one genius to any one moment. If you’re in a band, what you do is a group effort.”
Perry explained to the rock magazine that he’s been lucky to have never had to worry about money after his massive success with Journey in the 1980’s, revealing, “I wrote every single song with members of the band with the exception, I think, of one. And those songs kept selling. I don’t eat out a lot. I only drive one car a time. I live kind of small, so financially I never really had to work. There were certainly some sweet (royalty) checks as the years went by, but I’ll tell you something else: I was probably one of the only guys who saved his money. A lot of people were living very extravagant lifestyles. I was not raised that way. My grandfather said to me when I was very young, ‘It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you save.’ So I lived small and saved my money.”
