Favorites Playlists: No1--Journey
I've been playing with creating and sharing playlists that I create in my YouTube Music account. I can either share in YouTube Music or regular YouTube--I don't really know which is a better experience for different devices or circumstances. Please drop a comment and let me know which works better for you!
For some reason, Journey popped into my head today, so I put on their 1979 album Evolution, and it sent me down the rabbit hole. Before I started, I guessed that I'd find 30 songs that I'd consider worthy of making my Favorites list. That's a lot of great music.
As a comparison, earlier in the week, I started another playlist for a slightly earlier band--also in the Hall of Fame--that I really love. I couldn't get past 18 songs without getting into 'this is pretty interesting' vs. 'this kicks ass' territory. So I was kind of surprised that I ended up with 40 Journey songs that made the great music list. That comes to over 2 hours and 30 minutes of amazing Journey.
I'm not going to bother with any real Journey history, but Wikipedia has you covered.
My personal Journey history is significant, at least in my imagination, as I'll explain. The band first got big when I was in junior high, and they were pretty huge in high school when I first got there. This was based on the success of the first 3 albums with Steve Perry singing lead. The 4th album with Perry, Escape, is the one that really mega-exploded and became everywhere-all-the-time in the way that radio used to in the 80s.
By that point, I started liking each album progressively less than the one that came before it but was still a fan who hoped that they'd pull it back together. They were still way above average and the radio played the not-so-old more amazing work all the time. I attended the tour of the 1986 release Raised on Radio in Indianapolis while attending Purdue University. In my memory, I took a girl, X, along with a friend and his date. The songs really remind me of X, so they feel kind of special in a nostalgia-laced way. I'm not positive those songs would have made this list without the X connection.
After I posted the Wikipedia link for the band, I decided to check on the date of the Indy concert--It was September 1987, several months after breaking it off permanently with X. That made me remember that it was actually Y whom I took, but the whole thing didn't have the same nostalgia level anymore. I've been reading a lot about memory and how bad and easily manipulated our memory is, even though most people insist that their own memory is great. Since I've been focusing on it, I've started finding all kinds of discrepancies in memories that I thought were solid. The connection between the Raised on Radio songs and X hasn't been severed long enough to remove the songs from the list--maybe I'll see what I think a year down the road.
This has all been a long-winded way of saying that you have to take everything I say here forward with a grain of salt because I'm fact-checking nothing and apparently have a horrible memory. I'm afraid that if I check out too much, there won't be a story left. Everything that is probably wrong is followed by a ** to try to stay a little honest.
Before that Raised On Radio concert, Journey had many other ties to significant life events. I played Escape a lot in the car for the first girl I ever drove around in a car with. That was the fall of 1981. She also chose Infinity and Evolution as the albums to make out to in my parent's basement. She soon after dumped me because I was too slow for her romantic needs at the time. I was mostly petrified and had no idea what to do with girls--we didn't have PornHub as a bad example back then to help out, so I had to depend on what the other lying boys my age bragged about doing as my guide to sex. It didn't work out so well that whole junior year or senior year.
I had already asked this girl, whom I was thrilled even liked me, to homecoming. I found out she accepted an offer from an older guy as her way of breaking up with me. It crushed me because I hadn't yet grown callouses against getting dumped, and it hurts even with callouses. Some girl pals took the opportunity to fix me up with one of their dateless friends. It was a romantic non-starter, but the theme of the dance was Open Arms**. Then 18 months later, Frontiers was out, and Faithfully joined us together as one of the more effective slow songs of the night at senior prom.** I'm sure that I also played it dozens of times in the car as I parked with my date after the dance**.
None of the Journey albums after Perry left and even the album before he left have any songs that can crack the top 40. My last Journey story involves @TheJonathanCain. For some reason, around the time Journey got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I got into a Twitter fight about whether or not Arnel Journey matched up to Steve Perry Journey. There isn't anyone who has an opinion worth listening to who'd choose Arnel Journey. I respect that he's what they have now, but armed with a time machine and tickets to any Journey show I choose, I'm going back to see Steve Perry Journey as would anyone with taste. I attempted to be witty and slam people who thought that the 2017** version was as good as the golden age. @TheJonathanCain liked my comment, which I didn't really get. I am a huge fan of Cain in the Babys, Journey, and even Bad English. Was he really that open in public about how much better Journey used to be? Anyway, I felt bad after he liked the comment and decided to shut up. He still follows me, so I guess he didn't care too much. **Looking again, he no longer follows me on Twitter. I feel oddly and slightly disappointed at this fact check.
Enjoy the music and let me know what you think!
Comments
Post a Comment