Journey Escape

“Don’t Stop Believin’” wasn’t the biggest single on Escape, or even the second. But the fact that we’re still prepared to hear it anywhere and at any time—grocery stores, baseball games, karaoke bars, finales of revered prestige-television series—is a testament to how deeply the song lodged in the cultural imagination. Like The Beatles in the 1960s, Led Zeppelin in the 1970s or Nirvana in the 1990s, Journey captured their era, but they also transcended it. Listening to Escape, released in 1981, you can hear the blockbuster sound of the early Reagan years—the passion, the hair, the lights. But you can also hear the seeds of everything from Bon Jovi to Foo Fighters and Imagine Dragons—that blend of muscle and sensitivity that has defined arena rock for more than four decades. Interestingly, the singles that outshined “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the time—“Who’s Crying Now” and the Motown-esque “Open Arms”—pointed toward the past. And as an album in the era of so-called album-oriented rock, Escape is actually kind of weird, governed at one extreme by rowdy hard rock (“Dead or Alive”) and at the other by the fusion-curious sound the band had perfected long before vocalist Steve Perry was called up from the minors (“La Raza del Sol”). Talking to an interviewer in 2008, Perry described the feeling of being at a club and seeing a new generation sing along to “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the stereo: “There’s something reverent about that to me,” he said. “And I only wish to protect it, because it means something to them like it means something to me.”