Steve Perry talks about Traces his new album

Steve Perry talks about Traces his new album

Total Rock were invited to an exclusive listening party for the new Steve Perry album ‘Traces’. Perry talked about the background to the album, the ups and down of his career and his return to music and  highlights from the tracks on the new album:

 

SP: It’s been a long time coming. I was so fortunate to be in the band Journey it has been one of the biggest dreams coming true in my whole life. I grew up  loving music so much, especially the time when my parents divorced when I was about 6 or 7 years old and I discovered 45 rpm records and I would play them incessantly and it was a very safe place I could go to while all the crazy stuff was going on in my life and change was really going on which I was not too pleased with, but music was saving me. It became just a huge part of my soul. It started when I watched my father sing when I was about 4 years old. He was a performer, a baritone.  I knew I was able to sing as I thought ‘I could do that’.

 

Fast Forward to being in bands in high school everybody was in a cover band and I was too making a living playing other people’s music. Then I got fortunate. I would go to LA over and over again with a new band and new music trying to get a record deal:  it was really hard in those days to get signed. My tape ended up at Columbia records. Don Ellis  loved the tape and he called me and we talked about it and I was thrilled. Then the Monday morning when we were supposed to talk paperwork  my bass player who sang really beautifully really high and wrote great music with me was killed on the previous day the Sunday in a car wreck. I thought it was a sign I needed to chuck it in. I  called my mother and told her I thought I am not supposed to do this and she said don’t. The next week Don called me and said he had this band Journey that wanted to make a musical change. I knew about Neil Schon. I watched those guys play at the Starwood when they killed it and I said ‘I’d love to’. I met Neil in Colorado and we got together and wrote a song and that began my involvement with Journey which was a dream come true. But together with success comes challenges. We all had our challenges we were busy with. So partying, coupled with working really hard,  I got a form of musical PTSD. I didn’t know it. All I knew was that that the passion for music that saved my life was starting to go away. I was still writing and performing but the connection I had since I was a child  was a disconnect and it was scaring the living daylights out of me. No one knew. I didn’t say anything to the band there’s wasn’t the time  We all got together,  we would rock and go our separate ways no pun intended. To them it was sudden, for me it was not so sudden, it was a gradual thing One day I said ‘I can’t do this anymore. I need to stop’. They looked at me like I was out of my mind. I knew it was not going to be a popular idea. I knew the fans would be disappointed. The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is to walk away from something that I dreamt I could be in You don’t have to go very far to see people not survive their success in this business We keep losing people every day. Back then it wasn’t too popular to  take care of yourself.

 

So I stopped. I went to my hometown, reconnected with friends, went to the fair  in the summer, road my musical  in the countryside and  did all the things I used to do when I was younger. I walked away from music with the conviction that I was not going to come back I had already done that to the best it could be done. I had to top keep walking away and not looking back. I had to.  So that’s what happened.

 

Years went by and the longer I stayed away, the more I dealt with how to fix me and be ok. It was a challenge. I had to really work on that. But I kept walkin. The longer I walked the more I didn’t feel like going back into music. Then the Grunge scene hit. I figured ‘God bless em it’s their turn. There’s no place for me in any of this’ and I really got this affirmation I could keep walking, the whole thing was rolling in a different place. Patti Jenkins and I became really good friends because she did the movie ‘Monster’ with Christina Ricci and got hold of me about ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ which she wanted in the movie which was the start of the resurgence of that song. She got hold of me and I met her on the dubbing stage of the movie. We became best of friends. I talked to the band as we were still not talking too much. They agreed and she had the song. I got into the excitement of creating and editing. Patti calls me her canary in the coal mine as emotionally I wear my heart on my sleeve. When I am watching something my breathing becomes different and she uses me as an emotional compass. One day she was working on a tv show directing the last segment and the  camera panned cross the lunch area in the hospital. I asked ‘Who is that?’ She said ‘that’s Kellie Nash a PHD psychologist with cancer’ as there were real cancer patients on the programme. I said ‘do you have her e mail?’. Patti knew I don’t really do that and she asked me why. I said ‘I don’t know. There’s something about her. Just a pull. Maybe I could take her to lunch or I need a new shrink.’ I wanted to make it work somehow  Before I sent the e mail Patti told me Kellie’s cancer had come  back and she’s fighting for her life.  I thought I have lost everything and  I am just getting used to that. My heart said ‘bullshit’. We went to dinner and we were inseparable. It was just something I felt and she felt. Just a wonderful thing. We knew she was on a fight for life, but it was like two tracks on a train we treated it like a separate track and we did it for a year and a half, but then I lost her. It gets better, but you don’t get over it Before she passed she said ‘If something happened to me will you make me a promise that you won’t go back into isolation which would make this all for naught. It has to mean something somewhere.’ I said ‘I promise’. I was isolated from music. I was not writing or singing from the day I left. The new album is me keeping my promise. That’s what it is.

 

There’s a lot in this record: It’s not just a sad record. There are songs with profound loss in them, but it’s a happy record: there are songs about class reunion. But it only came about because a heart isn’t broken until its really broken. The good news is I have a completely broken heart. But my life is enriched, open and full. I am writing music again. It’s my own personal ‘journey’ if I can use that word. A necessary one: I learned to survive the music business. I had no plans it was going to go this way, but I had to to be open to whatever was coming and not just play it safe and fall back. That is how I got here. There’s ten songs on the record. 15 on the record you can buy on the online store and in Target.

 

Q: When were you last here in the UK?

 

SP: I was here about 4 years ago. I went to the Savoy and had high tea every day. Kellie had passed.  I went travelling for about a month across Europe and wore her sunglasses and when I got back I gave them to her mother.

 

Q: Does the artwork reflect that the recording was a trial by fire?

 

SP: No, but now that you mention it there were demons when I bought my studio. I opened up this place that you go where you’re alone. When you’re writing music you don’t know if it’s worth anything. To get that compass of decision is hard. You gotta listen o your heart about it. I had to wake up and trust.

 

Jeff Wack did the art, he’s a beautiful computer artist. It’s my concept. My whole life is there, my drum kit I played when I was in high school my grandfather’s barn on the California coast, milking cows, my high school sign, my bad time at catholic school and Sister Christina with the metal edged ruler in her right hand who did not hold back, the Bay bridge and a funnel cloud on two people smooching on the bridge. I never smooched on the bridge before, but Kellie and I walked to the middle of the bridge and we smooched and it was so great. The song ‘In the Rain’ is kind of about that.

 

First song on the album ‘No Erasin’ is about these two people who go to a class reunion. They haven’t seen each other in years, but they used to be an item. They go to the special spot where they used to smooch, they reminisce and have a fantasy about the whole thing. This also has a deep meaning when you sing this in front of other people. Songs all have different layers. This song came along and almost wrote itself. The bridge was something that just came along in such a fluent kinda way: it goes sixties for a second and then comes back and I love that.

 

‘No more Cryin’ I wrote it with Sydney Sonic/Dan Wilson a while ago and I had it in the back of my pocket. It’s our second single. It’s a love song. I talk about myself in the third person when I’m working. He doesn’t wanna love anymore , if he doesn’t love he won’t have to deal with the loss, part of the runaway that I did in my life. It gets honest about my relationships with isolation. It’s a piece of life behind closed doors. In the dark of the night he start to remember and there is no way to hide from this stuff. The song opens up to the solo: it’s a really beautiful piece of music I am really proud of.

 

‘Most of All’ talks about pictures, photographs and memories. I wrote it before I met Kelly, but it’s about her now I have lost her. At the end  I start to say my most of all. I start to send my message  I start to own it at the end, my own most of all: it’s subtle but it’s in there.

 

The record is all real musicians who bring their life and their loss into it. With them you think ‘Oh shit  this is good!’, but it’s hard to get that out of a machine, so that’s why we have all real musicians.

 

‘We’re still here’: I was working with a gentleman that Randy Jackson introduced my to Brian West just sketching some ideas. Walking back in Hollywood from dinner I was watching 14 and 16 year old with mini skirts that couldn’t get any shorter: they ain’t sitting down anywhere such a different groove going on. Watching boys chasing girls living this whole thing I realised it never changes it’s the same thing. The movie never changes. This song has overtones of youth. I saw myself in them and through them . We’re still here doing the same thing. So It’s an inclusive song about what goes on from the rites to passage in youth to now.

 

John 5 guitar player for Rob Zombie, we got together and wrote ‘Sun Shines Gray’ in about a minute There’s something dark, gloomy and shoe gazing about ‘Sun Shines Gray’. I thought it was a great title There’s a lot of Steve Perry vocals in there, stacked. I do all my own vocals still. This is a bigger track than you might expect this record to have. The old guy can rock a little bit you know.

 

When I was really young the ‘Help’ record came out and I heard this song  ‘I need you’ by George Harrison, but at the time with the climate of the music then they did it with a bossa nova beat. It was cute but I didn’t think it was the right way to do the song. I heard it as an R&B song,  a bigger song. I have never done a cover, but I said if I did I’d love to do this and we did and what we recorded had a great feel. I was please to see it exist the way I had seen it when I was younger, but I was not going to release it unless I got Olivia Harrison’s blessing.You can record any song you want it’s the law, you just have to pay a sync fee, but I wasn’t going to do this. George had a disconnect too in his life and he went out there, so I have empathy with George. Someone I knew was going to do a benefit with Olivia Harrison in Vegas and I said ‘would you tell her I have recorded one of George’s songs and I would love to play it to her. It would be a dream come true.’ I went to her office and I played it for her.  She listened to the CD and she restarted it and I was worried there’s something she didn’t like about it. But half way across the second listen she said ‘George would have loved this version.’ So I got the blessing from him and her at the same time. It felt so good.

 

I sequenced the record 20 times. I kept moving around the tracks and the bonus ones. ‘October in New York’ one of the bonus tracks came about at the very end. It turned out to be a closure letter to Kellie. Patrick Williams, a composer who worked with Mancini, I got to hang out with him at Capitol Studios and Al Schmidt is recording this orchestra. I  looked to his composing assistant. I asked if he had lyrics for a particular piece and was told ‘he wrote it last week it’s just a musical thing’ I said ‘can we get together my head’s going crazy’. So we got together and we wrote this in a minute, it just flowed really quickly, Unfortunately Patrick just passed away three months ago from lung cancer, but  he got to hear the finished product, he’s on  the record and we wrote the lyrics together with Jason his assistant. People say the most beautiful time in New York is autumn, but there’s not a lot of October in New York songs but there is one now.

 

I want to go everywhere musically. I don’t want any limitations any more. Music is life sustaining for me. It’s reinvigorated my passion for life. Watching people get a feel for it is all I want to do. With the hope that something will reach out to people who may get goosebumps or even a tear in the car alone.

 

Q: Will you be going back on stage?

 

SP: We are talking about that and as soon as I get back and my jetlag lets me sleep we’ll probably talk about that. I would love to perform again. I performed with the Eels for the first time in 25 years and that was a thrill for me to walk out in front of a crowd and I didn’t expect that. I loved the song ‘it’s a Motherfucker.’I went to the rehearsal and we worked out that song first and then a couple of Journey songs  The most beautiful juxtaposed melody with a killer lyric. I flew out and sang with them: It was fun. I would love to see me back on stage.

 

Q: The record seemed to come out very suddenly how hard was it to keep it secret?

 

SP: Very difficult. I wasn’t with a label.  I built a studio in my house. It gave me a creative freedom to put a toe in the water Paying for it myself gave me the freedom and the guts to do it. Then I got wonderful management and we talked about what to do. I also have an amazing record label that believes in music that has emotion behind it and to me that’s the most important thing of all. We had everyone signing NDAs so they wouldn’t talk about it so we could release it when we wanted to.  There’s a web site been built here in England and it’s working well.

 

Q: How easy was it to go back to writing and recording after such a long time?

 

SP: Difficult. My first sketch I played Patti Jenkins. I sketched an idea and arranged it. We went to lunch. I said ‘can I play you something?’  Patti always thought I should be writing.  I didn’t watch her when I played her the sketch: I was so scared it sucked as I have not put my creative toes in the water for a long time and my compass was not calibrated and  the music around me had changed. I realised I didn’t have to fit in: I could be me. I look over and she said ‘it’s amazing’ ‘But I am kicking sand it’s not done.’ But she said ‘it sounds like you’ and I just needed to hear that. There’s been people in my life supporting me and also management. I was drifting in life thinking I should do something contemporary as I love contemporary music. But my manager said ‘Do something different next time, but this has to be authentically Steve Perry.’ I realised he was right.

 

Q: Will we have to wait another ten years for anything more?

 

SP:No I am too old to wait any more.

 

Q: Any regrets?

 

SP: Looking back people thought he’s living the life living the dream and they pay money to watch you live the dream and write songs. I will tell you what I think I saw, I saw people who married their high school sweetheart, who have a van and kids, watch the game and have Chinese food at the weekend. That’s enough for them. I was envious of that, but for some reason as a kid I had to reach and go for more. Not complaining, it was a driving force, but I was envious  I had a slight regret I was not capable of staying in my home town and doing that. Cos I just couldn’t. I would rather reach out and not be successful.

 

Q: Your voice is on top form have you been singing privately?

 

SP: Not until I started recording. I tried to remember where it fits in the back of my throat where it sounds believable and where it sounds like bullshit. Because I am pretty hard on myself emotionally.

 

Q: Any Journey outtakes which might come to the surface as well?

 

SP: No I don’t have any and I don’t think there’s any left.

 

Dawn Osborne