After making a comeback to the music scene with upcoming solo album “Traces” following over two decades of absence, Steve Perry was expectedly asked if this means a classic Journey reunion is now also possible.
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The singer told 106.7 Lite FM (via Blabbermouth):
“No. I think that we’ve gone on our separate ways and we’re doing great. Arnel [Pineda] is a great singer and he’s been in the band for 10 years, but yeah, I don’t think that’s where I’m at right now.
“It took forever for me to find the passion for music again because I felt it was kind of damaged. I thought I would never feel that love again for music, so I had to walk. Now that I’ve found that again – I have so many other songs ready to be recorded.”
Have you done any singing during your hiatus?
“No. I mean, I really had the conviction of not coming back to this in order to really leave it. I kinda had to turn my back to leave because it was too painful. I can’t look back.
“I had to move forward, so I went to my hometown and I started riding my Harley up and down these old country streets and just hanging out and just reconnecting where I was born, where I was raised, which is California, the small town of Hanford, CA.
“I lost my parents – they were out there in the cemetery – so there were frequent visits out there, just to reconnect. Where have I been? What happened? And where am I now?”
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What’s your voice like these days?
“It feels good. Of course [there was rust]. Like you were asking me a second ago, the voice was cold when I first started. It was rough. I went, ‘Whoa, I need to do some work on this.’
“I gotta tell you: I have decided to take that pressure off of me because I’m just an older guy in a new world. I still have hair. [Laughs] I’ve decided to take the pressure off because I just want the material that I was writing to have an opportunity to be the best it could be for it is unto itself.
“So, every song I treat so differently. Like ‘No Erasin’,’ it’s a song about a reunion where these people go to this reunion and they hook up for the first time. I don’t mean ‘hook up’ – I mean start talking.
“They go outside and talk about what they used to be in high school and they go part where they used to park and smooch and they go in the back seat of her car.
“It’s about reconnecting with the past and there’s no erasin.’ You can’t get rid of those feelings. You might think you can, but guess what, everywhere you go, honey, there you are. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s about that.”