THE YEAR IS 1981!
- The line, “Strangers waiting, up and down the Boulevard” is a reference to Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, where dreams are made. Keyboard player Jonathan Cain got the idea for the song when he went there to pursue his career. In an interview, Cain said: “The song began with the chorus. My father had coached me. I was in Hollywood, struggling with my career, kind of lost. I was asking him, ‘Should I come back to Chicago and just give up on this dream?’ And he said, ‘No, son. Stay the course. We have a vision. It’s gonna happen. Don’t stop believin’.’”
- Journey lead singer Steve Perry, keyboard player Jonathan Cain and guitarist Neal Schon are the credited songwriters on this one, but the entire band contributed.
- In lead singer Steve Perry’s version of the boulevard he says that the song originated during a series of gigs in Detroit when he found himself in a hotel room unable to sleep, staring out of the window “I was digging the idea of how the lights were facing down, so that you couldn’t see anything,” he recalled. “All of a sudden I’d see people walking out of the dark, and into the light. And the term ‘streetlight people’ came to me. So Detroit was very much in my consciousness when we started writing.”
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In the last ever episode of the TV show The Sopranos, which aired June 10, 2007, Tony Soprano plays this song on a jukebox during the final scene. The episode abruptly ends with the lyrics “Don’t Stop” as the scene cuts to black.
Steve Perry said in People magazine June 13, 2007: “I needed to know how this song was going to be used. I didn’t want the song to be part of a blood-bath, if that was going to be the closing moment. In order for me to feel good about approving the song use, they had to tell me what happened. And they made me swear that I would not tell anybody.”
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MTV went on the air shortly before this song was released. The band made a Spartan performance video for it in an empty arena, apparently at a soundcheck. They made a better one with footage from a Houston stop on their Escape tour, which became the official video that shows up on their VEVO account. Neither video got much love on MTV, which preferred concept videos.
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