I think that, subliminally, when I start to produce stuff, I always look at it like a band performance.” I came into this world of music by being a band member. “I think the original version of Traces has a different emotion in the size of the tracks, the rhythms of the drums and the phrasings, the guitars and the solos,” he explains. So I started to see this combination of melody and lyric, lyric and melody, and the songwriting dance that happens between them that can stand alone by itself.”Īs he began to dive back into the songs on Traces, sometimes re-singing parts and sometimes recovering vocals that he had done in demos, Perry discovered how much the process appealed to him. It wasn’t what he said it was how he said it. And there was the Drifters’ lyric: ‘You can almost taste the hot dogs and French fries they sell.’ If you just write those words on a piece of paper, when I was young, I thought, ‘Really? Hot dogs and French fries? That doesn’t sound like a great lyric to me.’ But then I went back and started listening to it and it was (sings the lyric.) He (Johnny Moore of the Drifters) sold it. “Sam Cooke was one of the best ever to sell a lyric, no matter what he sang. I always wanted to know how they did that.” That’s because the people I admired as a kid, vocally, they did that. That’s been a challenge my whole life to try to reach for such performances that stand alone. “But when it comes down to it, these new alt-versions and sketches show how the songs that were stripped down began, just chorded versions, melody, and vocal pockets in the phrasing and the lyrics. “From a songwriting standpoint, the original seeds when the song is written are the basic compass that you use to follow the song to a bigger production, like Traces was when it was first released,” he says. Perry has always gravitated to the simple power of lyrics and melody, especially when they’re expressed in the right way. And I wanted everyone else to hear them sort of stripped-down.” I’ve always felt that about these songs, because I believe in them. If you can play that song with an acoustic guitar and sing the melody and sing the lyric, and it just works, then most likely it’s a real song. “I was doing that, and I loved all the elements so much, separated out, that I told my engineer Thom Flowers afterwards, ‘I think at some point we should probably do these acoustically, because the songs are so sound melodically and lyrically.’ Because they’re songs, I want them to be stripped-down and naked and pass the campfire test. “At the last minute, I asked the video crew, ‘Why don’t you come in and I’ll show you what these multi-tracks sound like?’ I started soloing certain elements like the background vocal stacks of ‘No Erasin’ or the lead vocal of ‘Most Of All.’ “I had finished the record and we were doing an interview in my studio,” he recalls. Part of the impetus behind revisiting Traces, which was his first release in a quarter-century, was to spotlight what Perry thought was an especially sturdy set of songs. What is the success of all these groups without songwriting? You gotta have a song first.” But if you don’t have a song, you’re lost.
“You can have vocal abilities, you can have a great band. “I don’t think that people have even looked at the songwriting aspect,” he says of his career. In an interview with American Songwriter to discuss the recently-released Traces (Alternate Versions & Sketches), featuring reimagined versions of songs from 2018’s Traces, Perry makes it clear that those other two personas couldn’t have been possible without the songwriting first. But it’s probably time that Steve Perry the songwriter shares in some of those accolades.
Steve Perry the singer and Steve Perry the former member of Journey get a lot of press.