most difficult steve perry songs to cover

He was just in his mid-forties but discovered he had a degenerative bone condition that would require hip-replacement surgery. The future looked bright.Įverything 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. Irving Azoff, who had just made the Eagles a fortune for their reunion album, was brought in to manage the band. They made a comeback album, scored a radio hit with the romantic ballad “When You Love a Woman” and earned a Grammy nomination. After the commercial failure of his second solo album, he got back together with his former bandmates in the mid-Nineties. Perry left Journey in 1987, but he never had sustained success as a solo artist. 'Silence of the Lambs': The Complete Buffalo Bill Story The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here) That was my critical review for me every night.” All I knew is every night we would get at least one to two encores. “I didn’t care what the critics thought about the band.

“We certainly were part of pioneering ,” Perry says. 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.

In the process, Journey basically invented the power ballad. 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. Virtually nobody has seen him do this since he parted ways with his band, Journey, 20 years ago. What’s really surprising, though, is that Perry is singing at all. It’s somewhat surprising to hear Perry, 69, sing a hit by a boy band a generation behind him. “I love songs like this,” he says of the tune, a Max Martin–penned ballad from 1997.

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.

Most difficult steve perry songs to cover