Two decades ago, Steve Perry walked away from a legacy of carefree rockers and sentimental torch songs. His last recordings at the time, bonus tracks on a greatest hits comp, allowed him to stretch his elastic vocal cords to great heights, the likes of which he’d soared to with Journey and. in the early part of his solo career, with “Oh Sherrie.” But then he went into near seclusion, emerging for only the occasional recording session, baseball game or (most quizzically) an Eels concert. He could be forgiven for his absence because it was easy to picture him out there living out his songs, lovin’, touchin’, squeezin’ in private. It turned out to be almost the truth. He’s since revealed that he was suffering from music-biz malaise. A woman he fell in love with encouraged him to return to singing before her death. “She made me promise not to keep isolating myself anymore,” he wrote in an explanatory statement. So he decided to make good on that promise and record Traces, his third solo LP overall and first full-length in nearly a quarter century. The album is very much a classic Steve Perry record, full of dramatic schmaltz, nostalgia and the occasional rocker. Lead single “No Erasin'” could be a Journey song with its crashing piano and guitar riffs and Perry’s reminiscences of hooking up with an old flame in the backseat of his car. “Sun Shines Gray” is a driving rocker that goes anyway he wants it (lots of slower, quieter parts for the singing and heavier parts in between). And “Most of All” drips with emotion as Perry croons for “the ones who’ve lost their most of all.” Perry’s voice is still elastic, but it’s huskier, scratchier and, at its worst, hoarser than it was in his glory years. Given his age, 69 years old, it’s in good shape but it’s still surprising, mostly because we haven’t heard from him in decades. The songs are evocative enough – he wrote “Most of All” with “Oh Sherrie” cowriter Randy Goodrum, and members of Semisonic and, curiously, Rob Zombie’s band – but none of them are knockout homeruns in the vein of “Oh Sherrie” (a song so catchy you can hear it in your head simply by reading the title). Moreover, it tends to stay in a sad place and rarely picks up – “Sun Shines Gray” is the hardest rocking song on the standard edition, though the bonus tracks on the deluxe version offer a few more upbeat numbers. Many of the songs are too cloying for their own good, but in a weird way that’s what you want from Steve Perry – you want to feel and remember. By that definition, Traces lives up to its title and offers reminders of Perry’s might. When he sings, “No more cryin’, ’cause I wont’ love again, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t” on “No More Cryin’,” he sings it in a way that makes you believe him.<doc-sep>Steve Perry's New Life: 'I've Rediscovered The Passion For Music' Enlarge this image toggle caption Emma Holley/Courtesy of the artist Emma Holley/Courtesy of the artist On May 25, 2014 in St. Paul, Minn., Steve Perry did something that he hadn't done in nearly 20 years: He got onstage and sang. After decades away from music — away from making it, performing it and even listening to it, at times — Perry is back. His first solo album in more than 20 years, Traces, is out Fri., Oct. 5. Starting in 1977, Perry fronted Journey. The rock band went platinum, filled stadiums and were mega stars. Perry was living a dream come true, one that he'd had since discovering a passion for music as a young child. But after years of touring, he says he started to feel "burnt around the edges" and decided to walk away from the band. "I think I just needed to connect again, to retouch the ground from where the dream started," Perry says. The impetus for Perry's musical revitalization initially stemmed from time spent back in Perry's hometown of Hanford, Calif., but, more recently, from falling in love. Perry largely credits the momentum behind Traces to a promise made to his late girlfriend, Kellie Nash. The couple met when Nash had breast cancer, leading to a year-and-a-half long relationship. Before she died, Perry promised her that he wouldn't revert to musical isolation after her passing. He kept his word. In fact, Perry says that one of the songs on the album, "Most Of All," was written for Nash before he even met her. "A heart isn't really complete until it's completely broken and mine was completely broken after I lost her," Perry says. "But that became the good news because from that came joy and songs and ideas." Many songs on Traces, like "No Erasin'," sound and feel like the kind of stadium rock songs Journey was known for. But Perry doesn't see this as an issue. "That would be a beautiful problem, if I could sound like the old Steve Perry, at this point. Honey, 'cause I ain't no spring chicken," he says. YouTube And then there are songs on the album that sound nothing like Journey. For instance, "October in New York," a ballad with a string orchestra, sounds more like Dean Martin than the rock masterminds behind "Don't Stop Believin'." For better or worse, Perry's time away from the mic reignited his passion for music, and caused the singer to tap into unknown parts of his musicianship. "My new life ... is going to be about recording anything that comes to my heart," Perry says, "because I've rediscovered the passion for music and it's something I don't want to let go of ever again."<doc-sep>It’s a Monday afternoon in August, and Steve Perry is cheerfully belting out the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long As You Love Me.” Perry is visiting a buddy at his house in San Francisco, and the singer — who grew up on Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and the Kingston Trio, and doesn’t listen to much current pop — is giving an example of a relatively modern song that caught his ear. “I love songs like this,” he says of the tune, a Max Martin–penned ballad from 1997. “I’m a sappy guy.” It’s somewhat surprising to hear Perry, 69, sing a hit by a boy band a generation behind him. What’s really surprising, though, is that Perry is singing at all. Virtually nobody has seen him do this since he parted ways with his band, Journey, 20 years ago. Perry and Journey became famous in the Seventies and Eighties for big, soaring arena-rock hits about devotion, passion and seizing the moment, some of them a little sappy indeed, all of them driven by Perry’s skyscraping vocals, which exerted a massive influence on generations of wasted karaoke warriors. In the process, Journey basically invented the power ballad. Critics often dismissed the band as cheeseballs, but that wasn’t fair; songs like “Faithfully” and “Lights” stand up as beautiful and plainspoken showcases for Perry’s remarkable voice. “We certainly were part of pioneering [the power ballad],” Perry says. “I didn’t care what the critics thought about the band. I really didn’t. All I knew is every night we would get at least one to two encores. That was my critical review for me every night.” Perry left Journey in 1987, but he never had sustained success as a solo artist. After the commercial failure of his second solo album, he got back together with his former bandmates in the mid-Nineties. They made a comeback album, scored a radio hit with the romantic ballad “When You Love a Woman” and earned a Grammy nomination. Irving Azoff, who had just made the Eagles a fortune for their reunion album, was brought in to manage the band. The future looked bright. Everything changed when Perry took a long hike in Hawaii and felt a horrible pain in his hip as he reached the top of a mountain. He was just in his mid-forties but discovered he had a degenerative bone condition that would require hip-replacement surgery. Terrified at that prospect, Perry experimented with alternative treatments that did little to address the problem. Eventually, Perry’s bandmates started getting restless. “They wanted me to make a decision on the surgery,” Perry says. “But I didn’t feel it was a group decision. Then I was told on the phone that they needed to know when I was gonna do it ’cause they had checked out some new singers.” Perry begged them to reconsider, but then postponed the date of his big surgery. “I said to them, ‘Do what you need to do, but don’t call it Journey,’” he says. “If you fracture the stone, I don’t know how I could come back to it.” They didn’t listen. Journey found a Perry soundalike named Steve Augeri and launched a tour that continues to this day. In 2008, Arnel Pineda — a Filipino singer they found on YouTube — took over on vocals, and the group began selling as many tickets as it did in its Eighties heyday, quite possibly thanks to Pineda’s uncanny ability to sound more or less exactly like Perry, whom he grew up worshipping. Understandably, Perry is a little uneasy talking about all of this, but he’s never made any attempt to reunite with his former mates. He showed up for Journey’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 and made an acceptance speech, though he didn’t perform with the band. “What they do is none of my business,” he says. “When I walked away from it, I did not go to any of the shows, nor did I listen to any of it.” While his former bandmates were making millions on the road, Perry was doing, well, not all that much. He rode around aimlessly on his motorcycle and moved from the Bay Area to San Diego, though he routinely flew back for San Francisco Giants games. Perry lived off his royalties (he says he carefully tucked away money from his Journey days) and avoided the spotlight, rarely giving interviews and politely turning away fans who begged for a photo. Basically, he became the J.D. Salinger of arena rock. “I didn’t sing in those years,” he says. “I didn’t write music. I must have gained 50 or 60 pounds. I got a butch haircut. I just said, ‘I’m going to just become a plump kid in my hometown again.’ I’d already lived the dream of dreams and didn’t know how I could come close to being anything like what I was before.” Rumors about Perry began to pile up. “They say I’m a recluse with long nails saving my urine in jars and living on an island with a morphine drip,” he says. “They think I’m in a hospital somewhere with cancer. And they say I can’t sing anymore.” That last one stings the most, and as he sings the Backstreet Boys song it’s clear it’s not true. Perry’s voice is certainly deeper than in his Journey days, when his upper register could rival any rock singer’s, but it’s still unmistakably Steve Perry: rich, raspy, expressive and overflowing with the sort of pulsating emotion that caused even Journey’s fiercest critics to compare him to his idol, Sam Cooke. Perry hasn’t lost his voice, but he has lost a lot over the years: his grandparents, who had helped raise him in rural Northern California after his mom and dad split; both of his parents; and his stepfather, who gave Perry work in his construction business to help him make ends meet in the pre-Journey days. “You want to know what I did after I left the band?” he says. “I visited my mom’s grave a lot.” Loneliness could creep in quickly. “One time I parked my car in front of the house I was raised in,” Perry says. “It was raining like crazy, the wipers were going and I was facing the house where I was raised, with my grandfather’s house to the right. I just started crying like a baby. I cried for the times we could have had together. I cried for the times that I took for granted. And they were all gone, and here I am, an only child, just missing them all. I used to think that if I became a performer and everybody loved me, that I wouldn’t have to go through these things. But guess what? There’s nowhere to run. If you’re alive, you have to walk through this eventually.” All of the loss may explain why the frontman who radiated such passion in his Journey days no longer felt much like singing. There was another big loss to come, but this one would lead him back to music, and, eventually, to his new solo album, Traces. It’s a story about devotion, tragedy and a promise to a dying loved one. It’s so intense and heartfelt, it could be a Journey song. Much of what happened to Perry in the past decade can be traced back to his most famous song. Perry wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’” with Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain and guitarist Neal Schon in 1981. The title phrase came from Cain’s father, something he’d say to encourage his son to keep going when he was a young musician eking out an existence in L.A. Cain said he drew inspiration from characters he knew in the Sunset Strip rock scene of the early 1970s: These were the “streetlight people living just to find emotion” of the song’s lyrics. Perry has a different memory. “Jonathan and I scrawled out the lyrics about things that I had seen in Detroit one night after a show, looking way down to the street and seeing the streetlights light the streets,” he says.<doc-sep>
In releasing his first solo album in nearly a quarter-century, Steve Perry is keeping a promise. After exiting Journey in 1998, the singer adopted a low profile. Seven years ago Perry met Kellie Nash, a PhD in psychology who was battling the breast cancer that would eventually claim her life. Before she passed Nash made the singer swear to end his professional isolation. “Kellie taught me that it really is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” he says. A love of love music reignited, Perry is in London promoting Traces – and keeping that promise. “Being here and talking to you now is part of that,” he states. Some critics have complained that the album is too ballad-heavy, but Perry disagrees. “There’s a lot of emotion on the record,” he argues. “I’ve heard that it doesn’t rock enough, but if I rock a lot some demand to know where the ballads are.” Either way, Traces represents a brand new start. Perry is considering offers to tour – and it’s something he’d like to do. Watch this space. “Kellie would love this record,” he smiles, “but more importantly she’d be proud that I kept my promise to her and made another record – something I swore that I would never do.” Traces is out now. No Erasin' "That song has an almost 1960s-style vibe that reminds me of The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy). It evolved into being about two people who meet at a class reunion. They have lives in different cities, but here they are together back where they grew up. They jump in a car, park it up at one of their old haunts, and they jump into the backseat and smooch. "But there are other interpretations. For instance, if I ever go on a stage again the opening line of ‘It’s been a long time coming since I saw your face’ – that’s about my relationship with the audience." We’re Still Here "It was instigated by myself and Brian West, who I met through [former Journey bassist] Randy Jackson. We sketched on it a while and went out to dinner. Coming back there were all these young kids running around on the corner of Sunset & Vine, living their lives and doing the things we did at their age. We’re still here but they’re doing it now – city girls running wild under neon lights." Most Of All "I wrote that song with Randy Goodrum, the same guy that co-wrote Foolish Heart and Oh Sherrie [from Perry’s 1984 solo debut Street Talk] with me. It was around even before I met Kellie. I didn’t tell her about it to avoid affecting her struggle. But after she passed I remembered it on my hard drive and realised that it was about her before I even met her, and now it’s even more about her after I lost her. It’s a very important song on this record." No More Cryin’ "Dan Wilson from the band Semisonic sketched that song one afternoon at my condominium, it came together very quickly. I played bass and Dan added the rolling guitar part. That became a symphonic bed for the guitar solo by Thom Flowers [producer], which is one of my favourite parts of the entire record. The Hammond organ parts are by Booker T Jones which was a dream come true for me as Green Onions is the ringtone of my phone. "It seems as though the subject is isolating himself from romance to avoid pain. But in the dark of the night there’s nowhere to run; you’re in the world, you might as well love anyway." In The Rain "That’s another that was written before Kellie came into my life. It deals with profound loss. The lyrics are really poignant in a visual sense. They paint photographs – ‘Your face in a photograph/Staring back in silence/Pretending you’re here tonight’ [he sighs loudly]. That’s what it was like for the two years after I lost her, I sat in my house alone. I no longer have escape behaviours; I behave myself these days, so I had to feel the pain. It was pretty hard. Again, I didn’t play that one to Kellie for the same reasons I just mentioned. She got to hear rough sketches of a lot of the record, but I kept those two completely secret from her."