Steve Perry - Guitar for the Practising Musician Dec 84

Not only is Steve Perry's vibrant, quivering soprano a veritable definition of the rock 'n' roll voice, a voice that transformed Journey from a bad trip to an extended vacation in top 40 Paradise, but the man has a hand in all of their songs, adding a note here, a lyric there, whatever it takes to make a song work. On his own behalf he has collaborated with some of the finest on the compositions in Street Talk, his new album, the success of which has prompted some to wonder if this could spell the end of Journey. While the faithful will never stop believing, Perry himself was content to delve into the songwriting process that helped produce not only Oh Sherrie and She's Mine for the solo flight, but After The Fall, Faithfully, Don't Stop Believing, etc. for the extended Journey.

I'm real fortunate. I don't profess to be a trained writer. I have a lot of friends who can score music and whip off the most incredible licks and make melodic inversions that would make you run for the hills. I'm the kind of guy who goes on the gut level, the emotional level, on melodies, on the feel and

changes. I come up with melodies and some of the groove ideas and some of the arrangements, and then I end up finishing things with other people. I like to get some insight lyrically from someone else, 'cause my lyrics sometimes can be too one-dimensional. I play the bass guitar enough to where I can get

a groove and play some changes along with another instrument, like keyboard or guitar. I was a drummer for years, too. I could play drums better than I play bass. I used to be a drummer-singer, until about '76, just before I joined Journey. That helps my songwriting, because everything comes from a beat-oriented place. If you don't have a rhythm to something, it doesn't make much difference. If you have drums and bass and voice and melody and lyrics, you've got yourself a song. I can sing better almost with a bass in my hand. It'll freeze my memory from thinking about singing and occupy me. My voice is another instrument. I can lay down drum feels with it by telling somebody in an acappella fashion, by mimicking anything on guitar. If you have a voice you're halfway there.
I think it's far better for a singer to write songs for himself. It's like you get to make your own shoes. Although there are songs I have adapted to; I can take them into me and wear and sing songs I haven't written-but I haven't done that in a long time.

I feel an insight into what I'm lacking. I'm sure there's an insight into what I'm offering, as a compromise. I try to find people who need what I have to offer, and offer what I really need. Say there are four guys and someone's laying a lick down and they want someone to come up with a tune, then I will try and pull that into light, whether it's a verse or a chorus. That's my gig. It depends on the song. Like in Captured By The Moment, I had the lyric, but I had no idea what the heck it meant. So I decided to find out and I came across many things that could fit. Finally, Randy (Goodrum) and I were sitting there one day and we just started talking from pal to pal-it was a great moment in time. Something was captured in that moment that meant more to me even than the period we wrote about.
When I was trying to write lyrics to Run Alone I knew exactly what I wanted and what the song needed. I wanted a very streety kind of vision of a guy up on top of a hill in Los Angeles and looking down. It's

dark and he's seeing the light and he's thinking about his life and reflecting on how hard he's trying to succeed. I knew exactly what I wanted to write about, but I couldn't really capture an overview of the whole thing. So I got John Bettis to come in and John and I sat down and it took about four days to write it. The lyrics to that song are a very, very personal statement to me. Maybe one of the reasons I couldn't pull it off was that I needed a little more of a session, so to speak, to bring it out. A lot of the lyrics on this album were like that. I think I needed some therapy sessions to bring out what I wanted to say.
I wrote with a lot of different people. It was, you know, come on over at 12 or 1 in the afternoon and show me a couple of your ideas. You don't need that much of a fantastic chord change to start off an idea. Just lay a couple of chords on me and let's go. I think optimism is about 80-90% of it. If you just have optimism something will come up and it'll work out okay.

I don't get middle of the night ideas. I'm a shower person; I hear things in the shower-I don't even have an echoey shower. There's just something about running water. Another place I get ideas is in cars. It must be the motion or something. I carry one of those small mini-cassette players, but I have yet to use it, because I don't have any desire to hum and groove into this thing. I just usually remember stuff and sing it over and over, and then I start working on it in my mind to where I can sing it really well. I do have a little four track machine in my house next to the piano, probably the oldest Teac ever made. That's just in case I want to lay down some sort of memory demo with finished lyrics I can just forget about. I would never have a studio in my house. I don't like those special kind of groove rooms. I like impromptu rooms where the spontaneous kind of honest things can happen. I don't really want to go into making any demos of quality because I might capture something and it'll be into a 'beat the demo'

situation on a professional machine.
Personally, if you're in a group situation, I think demos are a bad idea, because demos lock in a musicians first impression of what he would do to a song, onto whatever is on the tape, and he can't get out of it. I'd rather have someone keep their demo for memory purposes and just sit there and wank away at a piano, or wank away at a guitar, and say, this is the idea, this is how it goes.
Ideally, I like nothing more than to write a song, grab the band, go into the studio and rehearse it up, and then record it immediately. Because sometimes you can make a demo for yourself and it sounds so good cause it sounds so honest, and then you'll go into the studio on professional machines and try to recreate that honesty and it's too difficult. That first premise, the first idea, the first seed is the most honest and most charged part of a song, and I think it should never be ignored, cause it can be worked right away from itself. I really, really believe that.