The man behind Don’t Stop Believin’ had abandoned music – until he fell in love with a dying woman, who made him promise to return to performing
Steve Perry is explaining all the ways in which Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ can hook a listener. “The quarters on the piano – that intro’s a hook.” He bursts into song, his alto/countertenor still distinctive at 69 years old, and he is so powerful that it is offputting: “‘Just a smalltown girl’ is a hook. ‘Strangers waiting’ is a hook. ‘Up and down the boulevard’ – hook. [His bandmate] Jon Cain thought the ‘streetlights, people’ section was a chorus. Then I turned round and said: ‘Now we need to write the chorus of choruses.’ No one knew what that meant; nor did I. But I knew we had to take it somewhere bigger and never go back to the song again. Because it had done all these things I had mentioned and, in my opinion, it needed to go one more place.”
Don’t Stop Believin’, a monster hit in the US on its release in 1981 and since championed on the TV show Glee, has been so unavoidable in the past few years that you wouldn’t guess Perry has largely been silent for 20 years, since he left Journey once and for all. There were a couple of low-key appearances on other people’s records, the very occasional interview (not a favoured pastime even when he was with Journey) and that was it. But the ubiquity of Don’t Stop Believin’ made it seem as if he was ever-present.
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