What a Journey: Looking back on 10 of the band’s Hot 100 hits ahead of the United Center show Monday
LOS ANGELES — Turn on a radio between 1978 and 1987 and you were sure to hear Journey — any of the more than two dozen sumptuous yet muscular rock hits that shaped young America’s ideas about love, inspiration and wanting it the way you need it. Four decades later, the band’s music is still everywhere, including television, social media and streaming platforms like Spotify, where Journey has more monthly listeners than Bruce Springsteen, U2 or Bob Dylan. Yet now the group has embarked on what it’s calling its farewell tour — a capstone (at least if the band is to be believed) to a long career full of twists and turns. Journey headlines Chicago’s United Center on Monday, Oct. 5.
Indeed, domination was hardly a given when guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist Gregg Rolie — both of whom had played with Carlos Santana — formed Journey as a kind of jazzy proto-jam band in San Francisco in 1973. But with the addition a few years later of singer Steve Perry, the group found its gloriously dramatic sound and began racking up hits one after the next (though critics were rarely kind). Perry eventually quit, which took the wind out of Journey’s sails until Schon discovered an uncanny soundalike from the Philippines, Arnel Pineda, on YouTube; he’s helped the band get back into arenas and the occasional stadium even as Schon and keyboardist Jonathan Cain, who replaced Rolie in 1980, have battled each other in court over financial matters.
Got all that? To try to make sense of Journey’s path, I’ve ranked 10 of the band’s hits that have charted on Billboard’s Hot 100. Hold onto that feeling — it goes on and on and on and on.
10. ‘Suzanne’ (peaked at No. 17 in August 1986)
Easily Perry’s most unhinged vocal performance.
9. ‘Send Her My Love’ (peaked at No. 23 in November 1983)
A luscious and melancholy white-soul song that I’d bet Phil Collins admired back in the day — and that Justin Bieber would probably flip for now.
8. ‘Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” (peaked at No. 16 in October 1979)
Inducting Journey into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, Train’s Pat Monahan belted the na-na-na outro of the band’s first Top 40 hit as he made his case for the group’s excellence. “They didn’t even need lyrics — that’s how (expletive) this band is,” he pointed out.
7. ‘Lights’ (peaked at No. 68 in September 1978)
Dodgers fans can delight in the fact that Perry originally wrote this paean to San Francisco — an anthem taken up at one time or another by every Bay Area pro sports team, including the Giants — about the lights going down and the sun shining on … Los Angeles. (Swap out “the bay” for “L.A.”) Maybe that’s why “Lights” has always felt to me like a precursor to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge.”
6. ‘Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)’ (peaked at No. 8 in March 1983)
[Listens to “Eye of the Tiger” once.]
5. ‘I’ll Be Alright Without You’ (peaked at No. 14 in February 1987)
Shout out to future “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson, who joined Journey for “Raised on Radio” and proceeded to lay down the slinkiest, sultriest, funkiest bass line the band had ever known.
4. ‘Don’t Stop Believin’” (peaked at No. 9 in December 1981)
Believin’ in what, exactly? The genius of Journey’s most-streamed track on Spotify is its use of concrete images to advance a pretty mysterious narrative. We’ve all stood under a streetlight; we all know the smell of wine and cheap perfume. Yet everybody’s midnight train is going to a different anywhere.
3. ‘Open Arms’ (peaked at No. 2 in February 1982)
Famously — and fortuitously — rejected by a former bandmate of Cain’s as “sentimental rubbish,” “Open Arms” was perhaps just waiting to be embraced by Perry, who sings it with the wounded gusto of a man well acquainted with regret. In a poetic twist, Journey’s highest-charting hit was blocked from No. 1 by the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” in which the heartbroken narrator goes laughing all the way to his bed.
2. ‘Who’s Crying Now’ (peaked at No. 4 in October 1981)
The first of three Top 10 singles from 1981’s 10-times-platinum “Escape,” this immaculate R&B jam imagines an alternate dimension where Perry and Cain hear Earth, Wind & Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone” and decide to form a new group with David Foster. Except Perry remembers the song as a high point for Schon: “You know the guitar outro from ‘Who’s Crying Now’?” he asked a New York Times reporter in 2003. “I fought for that because I knew no DJ would cut that song off with Neal’s guitar wailing at the end of it. It was too brilliant.”
1. ‘Faithfully’ (peaked at No. 12 in June 1983)
It wasn’t the first rock ballad about life on the road — and it definitely wasn’t the last — but “Faithfully” might be the most emotionally generous: “Loving a music man ain’t always what it’s supposed to be,” Perry tells his lady, grounding the song in the experience of those who leave and those left behind; later, he envisions their reunion with such tenderness — “I’ll get the joy of rediscovering you” — that you know he’s already decided to take off again.
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“Journey Final Frontier Tour 2026”
When: 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5
Where: United Center, 1901 W. Madison St., Chicago
Tickets: Start at $49.40 at ticketmaster.com/