Believin’ one song’s Journey-Story of the hit that won’t die
Posted: Sun May 23, 2010 11:49 pmBelievin’ one song’s Journey
Story of the hit that won’t die
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/m ... DjDbH52IOP
By REED TUCKER
Last Updated: 8:22 AM, May 23, 2010
Posted: 11:04 PM, May 22, 2010
New York Post
It took Journey 30 minutes to write one of the most enduring songs in rock history. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is, in many ways, more popular now than when the band first released it in 1981. It turned up in the “The Sopranos” finale, got a huge boost when it was featured on the first season of “Glee” and is the go-to song for wedding parties and bar crawlers looking to end a night of revelry with a bang.
The song is the best-selling catalog track on iTunes (more than 2 million downloads), and in January it charted twice in the UK’s Top 10: the original at No. 6, the “Glee” cover at No. 5.
The song was written by keyboardist Jonathan Cain, guitarist Neal Schon and singer Steve Perry while the band was writing and rehearsing new material for the album “Escape” in an Oakland warehouse Schon had bought from a member of Sly and the Family Stone. One day, Cain came in with a chorus melody and the lyric, “Don’t stop believin.’ ”
“The phrase came from my father,” Cain says. “I had a tough time trying to get down the road in the music business, and he used to tell me that stuff, ‘Don’t stop believing’ and, ‘Stick to your guns.’ ”
From there, Perry mostly dictated the structure.
“He worked backwards,” Cain says. “He said, ‘You need to start this thing like it’s going somewhere. Give me some rolling piano.’ So I started playing. Then I think Neal came up with the bass line. Steve scat on that.”
Schon then added his urgent, 16th-note arpeggiated guitar riff, played on a Les Paul, after Perry suggested he needed to sound like “a train.”
The next day, Cain went over to Perry’s house, and the two wrote the full lyrics about a “small-town girl” and a “city boy.” The line about taking a “midnight train going anywhere” was a reference to Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” while the lyric, “Strangers waiting/Up and down the boulevard” was pulled from Cain’s time living in LA in the early 1970s.
“My brother and I used go down Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night, and it was like a zoo, all those people cruising,” he says. “I never knew where they all came from or what they wanted.”
The song’s structure is unconventional, in that it builds slowly and has the chorus at the end of the song.
“To this day, even my [current] producer Kevin Shirley says it’s the oddest arrangement ever,” Schon says. “So I think, maybe that’s why it’s so big. It’s a bit unpredictable.”
Odd as the song may have been, the record company had no power to demand changes. Journey’s contract gave the band complete creative control. The entire “Escape” album was made for just $80,000, because the band was so well rehearsed and Perry, whose mantra was, “Time is money,” rarely did more than two takes of a song.
Schon guesses that today, “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” earns the band “double or three times” the amount of any other song. Royalties are complicated to estimate, but Jay Cooper, an LA-based entertainment attorney, says songwriters are paid 9.1 cents per download and an additional percentage for performing the song, as well. From iTunes sales of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” alone, Journey has probably earned more than $462,000.
And that’s not counting the income the song generates from being spun more than 5 million times on TV and radio, according to Broadcast Music Inc. Another revenue stream comes from the advertisers and filmmakers who are clamoring to license the song. (Schon, Cain and Perry must unanimously sanction each usage.)
“I get so many e-mails a day requesting our approval, I just leave it up to management,” Schon says. “I thought with ‘Glee,’ when you get exposure like that, it’s hard to say no.”
Story of the hit that won’t die
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/m ... DjDbH52IOP
By REED TUCKER
Last Updated: 8:22 AM, May 23, 2010
Posted: 11:04 PM, May 22, 2010
New York Post
It took Journey 30 minutes to write one of the most enduring songs in rock history. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is, in many ways, more popular now than when the band first released it in 1981. It turned up in the “The Sopranos” finale, got a huge boost when it was featured on the first season of “Glee” and is the go-to song for wedding parties and bar crawlers looking to end a night of revelry with a bang.
The song is the best-selling catalog track on iTunes (more than 2 million downloads), and in January it charted twice in the UK’s Top 10: the original at No. 6, the “Glee” cover at No. 5.
The song was written by keyboardist Jonathan Cain, guitarist Neal Schon and singer Steve Perry while the band was writing and rehearsing new material for the album “Escape” in an Oakland warehouse Schon had bought from a member of Sly and the Family Stone. One day, Cain came in with a chorus melody and the lyric, “Don’t stop believin.’ ”
“The phrase came from my father,” Cain says. “I had a tough time trying to get down the road in the music business, and he used to tell me that stuff, ‘Don’t stop believing’ and, ‘Stick to your guns.’ ”
From there, Perry mostly dictated the structure.
“He worked backwards,” Cain says. “He said, ‘You need to start this thing like it’s going somewhere. Give me some rolling piano.’ So I started playing. Then I think Neal came up with the bass line. Steve scat on that.”
Schon then added his urgent, 16th-note arpeggiated guitar riff, played on a Les Paul, after Perry suggested he needed to sound like “a train.”
The next day, Cain went over to Perry’s house, and the two wrote the full lyrics about a “small-town girl” and a “city boy.” The line about taking a “midnight train going anywhere” was a reference to Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” while the lyric, “Strangers waiting/Up and down the boulevard” was pulled from Cain’s time living in LA in the early 1970s.
“My brother and I used go down Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night, and it was like a zoo, all those people cruising,” he says. “I never knew where they all came from or what they wanted.”
The song’s structure is unconventional, in that it builds slowly and has the chorus at the end of the song.
“To this day, even my [current] producer Kevin Shirley says it’s the oddest arrangement ever,” Schon says. “So I think, maybe that’s why it’s so big. It’s a bit unpredictable.”
Odd as the song may have been, the record company had no power to demand changes. Journey’s contract gave the band complete creative control. The entire “Escape” album was made for just $80,000, because the band was so well rehearsed and Perry, whose mantra was, “Time is money,” rarely did more than two takes of a song.
Schon guesses that today, “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” earns the band “double or three times” the amount of any other song. Royalties are complicated to estimate, but Jay Cooper, an LA-based entertainment attorney, says songwriters are paid 9.1 cents per download and an additional percentage for performing the song, as well. From iTunes sales of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” alone, Journey has probably earned more than $462,000.
And that’s not counting the income the song generates from being spun more than 5 million times on TV and radio, according to Broadcast Music Inc. Another revenue stream comes from the advertisers and filmmakers who are clamoring to license the song. (Schon, Cain and Perry must unanimously sanction each usage.)
“I get so many e-mails a day requesting our approval, I just leave it up to management,” Schon says. “I thought with ‘Glee,’ when you get exposure like that, it’s hard to say no.”
