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.’
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“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.
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“You can have vocal abilities, you can have a great band.
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“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.