Journey’s biggest hits, ranked from worst to best
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 Saturday night the group will bring what it’s calling its farewell tour to Crypto.com Arena — a capstone (at least if the band is to be believed) to a long career full of twists and turns.
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 all 25 of the band’s hits that have charted on Billboard’s Hot 100, starting with the worst and ending with the best. Hold onto that feeling — it goes on and on and on and on.
25. ‘Walks Like a Lady’ (peaked at No. 32 in July 1980)
Some are born to sing the blues, as Perry once observed — just not Perry himself, who chews his way through this corny come-on like an overserved uncle at the Hard Rock Cafe. Nice showcase for Rolie’s organ work, though, on one of the last Journey singles he played on before leaving the band.
24. ‘Just the Same Way’ (peaked at No. 58 in May 1979)
Rolie and Perry tag-teaming lead vocals is not a form of democracy I’d vote for.
23. ‘After the Fall’ (peaked at No. 23 in August 1983)
Safe? Sterile? Soulless? Look, the haters can’t always be wrong.
22. ‘Too Late’ (peaked at No. 70 in January 1980)
“Before your time has run astray / You’ve got to try to get away.”
21. ‘Anytime’ (peaked at No. 83 in July 1978)
After overseeing Queen’s first few albums, producer Roy Thomas Baker turned his attention to Journey (and to the Cars); this midtempo number from the “Infinity” LP offers a credible approximation of Queen’s trademark stacked vocal harmonies.
20. ‘The Party’s Over (Hopelessly in Love)’ (peaked at No. 34 in April 1981)
Three platinum plaques in less than two years — for “Infinity,” “Evolution” and “Departure” — meant that Journey had no choice but to drop a live record, “Captured,” at the top of 1981. (It went platinum by Christmas.) As extra consumer bait, the double album closed with this new studio cut built around a killer Schon lick (and not much else).
19. ‘Good Morning Girl’/‘Stay Awhile’ (peaked at No. 55 in September 1980)
Phantom of the roller rink.
18. ‘Why Can’t This Night Go On Forever’ (peaked at No. 60 in May 1987)
Propelled by the success of his debut solo album — not to mention his appearance on the smash all-star “We Are the World” — Perry assumed greater control of Journey’s sound for 1986’s synthed-up “Raised on Radio,” which spawned no fewer than five singles, ending with this slightly lugubrious ballad. Yet the takeover came with a cost: By the end of 1987, the band had entered a hiatus that would last nearly a decade.
17. ‘Still They Ride’ (peaked at No. 19 in July 1982)
Listen to how nimbly Perry maneuvers some very tricky intervals.
16. ‘When You Love a Woman’ (peaked at No. 12 in December 1996)
Journey reunited for 1996’s “Trial by Fire,” which brought the band its only Grammy nomination (and which might feature the ghastliest album cover in music history). If the members knew that rock had changed dramatically while they were away, they didn’t show it in the LP’s romantic lead single: “When You Love a Woman” — a chart-topper for three weeks on Billboard’s adult contemporary tally — clearly sought to pick up where “Open Arms” and “Faithfully” had left off.
15. ‘Girl Can’t Help It’ (peaked at No. 17 in November 1986)
Wonder what Perry and Huey Lewis talked about between takes on “We Are the World.”
14. ‘Be Good to Yourself’ (peaked at No. 9 in May 1986)
“Karate Kid”-core.
13. ‘Only the Young’ (peaked at No. 9 in March 1985)
More “Karate Kid”-core, in this case released first as a song by Patty Smyth’s band Scandal; Journey’s version later wound up alongside Madonna’s “Crazy for You” on the soundtrack to “Vision Quest.”
12. ‘Wheel in the Sky’ (peaked at No. 57 in May 1978)
Before Perry came aboard in 1977, Journey spent a few months with Robert Fleischman as lead singer — long enough for Fleischman to co-write the group’s first Hot 100 entry, not so long that he got to sing it on the record.
11. ‘Any Way You Want It’ (peaked at No. 23 in April 1980)
Ooh, baby, hold tight.
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 badass this band is,” he pointed out. Still, let’s not gloss over the appealing perversity of starting a song this horny the way Perry does: “You make me weep and want to die.”
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 (with more than 2.9 billion plays) 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.
