The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Believin’ again
Journey’s Steve Perry emerges from lengthy hiatus
With Journey he coined the mantra “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
But most had given up hope they’d ever again hear from Steve Perry, the man who put the nonexistent South Detroit on the map (see sidebar) — at least not musically.
The singer is back this week with his just-released solo album “Traces.” That breaks a 22-year gap since “Trial By Fire,” his final release with Journey, and the 24-year interim since his second solo album, “For the Love of Strange Medicine.”
During that time, Perry was mostly out of sight but not out of mind as Journey’s popularity soared during the past couple of decades. But while he’d occasionally pop up in random places — at San Francisco Giants games, onstage with the Eels in 2014, Journey’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2017 — there was neither new music nor discussion about what he was up to.
Now, however, Perry’s return is marked not only by making new music but also having a greater passion for it than he says he’s had since Journey’s ‘80s heyday.
“I just told my management the other day, ‘I want you to look at me like a guy who has the passion of a young, young man for music — but he’s no spring chicken,’ ” Perry, 69, says by phone with both a sigh and a laugh. “This body is kind of old. It’s getting up there, and it hurts occasionally, believe me.
“But inside of me, I feel emotionally and — more importantly than anything — musically, like I’m in my 20s again. I got back in contact with and in touch with something I didn’t think I’d ever feel again. I don’t know how that happened, but I feel rejuvenated.”
That said, Perry acknowledges that the two-plus decades away — during which he “lived life on life’s terms” — has left a mark that informs the songs on “Traces.”
“I think that my voice is still me, but I look at it as something that has lived away from what it used to be for a while,” he explains. “Life has seasoned it and tempered it in ways that it didn’t have before — but, I think, all for the better.”
Perry, a native of Hanford, Calif., says his point of departure came well before his seeming disappearance in the mid-’90s. It was during February 1987, after six albums and a decade of hard touring with Journey amid immense popularity that left him nothing short of burned out.
“That’s when I first said, ‘That’s it. I’m walking away,’ ” recalls Perry, who in addition to singing co-wrote nearly every Journey hit between 1978-96 and had a solo smash with 1984’s “Oh Sherrie.” “I had lost my passion for it, and that was frightening for me because I’d discovered a passion for music and for singing when I was 6, 7 years old, and it never left me.
“And now it had gone away, and that scared the hell out of me. So I know the only thing to do was stop.”
By Perry’s account he “went back to life,” tooling around his hometown on his motorcycle, visiting family and friends and “just reconnecting.”
“It was an amazing ride being in a band like Journey,” Perry says now. “It was like being in a satellite circling the Earth for a while. But it was time to come down.”
Perry did resurface during the mid-’90s with “Strange Medicine” and “Trial By Fire,” but health problems rendered him unable to tour with Journey at that time. When the group elected to move on without him, “That was all right. Everybody was just doing what was right for them,” he says.
He occasionally worked on music, however, and even had some songs sketched out when he began a relationship with Kellie Nash during 2011. Though she was suffering with terminal cancer the two fell in love quickly and lived in New York for her treatments. Nash — who died in December 2012 — provided both inspiration and encouragement.
“I had shut it down pretty strongly,” remembers Perry, who even declined to sing with Journey during its Rock Hall induction ceremony.
“Before I met her, I wasn’t singing, I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t singing in the shower or anything.” But one day, while walking back from a treatment, Nash began humming a melody from something Perry had played for her. “I’m thinking, ‘What is that?,’ then, ‘Whoa, that’s one of my sketches!’” says Perry, who had his own melanoma removed in 2013. “I guess I was looking for some sort of nudge that maybe I can still do this. Maybe I’m valid at some level. I still have something in myself that’s credible and worth saying.
“I mean, she was just humming something. She didn’t remember what it was. I don’t think she was hustling me, but she was a Ph.D psychologist, so maybe she was putting me together.”
Before she died, Nash also left Perry with one request. “We were lying in bed in the dark talking to each other, and she said, ‘Make one promise ... If something was to ever happen to me, promise me you won’t ever go back into isolation, ‘cause that would make this all for naught,’ ” Perry says. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll make that promise.’ ”
“Traces” makes good on that, with 10 songs (15 on the deluxe edition) that range from rockers such as “No Erasin’” — it starts the album with the declaration “I know it’s been a long time comin’ — and “Sun Shines Gray,” co-written with Grosse Pointe native John “5” Lowery, to his trademark ballads and a cover of the Beatles’ “I Need You.” He stretches even broader on the deluxe edition, crooning Sinatra-style on “October in New York” and the reggae of “Call On Me.”
“This is an Americana record about the types of music that moved and changed and enriched and gave me life-sustaining emotions,” Perry explains. “I’m just trying to give it back, that’s all — to give it back in the way I know how.”