• AllMyVinyl #79
• Band: Journey
• Album Title: Escape
• Release Date: 20 Jul 1981
• Date purchased: 8 Jun 2022
• Location purchased: Walmart
• Color of vinyl: clear
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

One of the biggest albums ever is next up on my vinyl series.  That’s the seventh overall album by San Francisco band Journey.  Escape was a monster hit for them – and is their best selling studio album of all time (oddly Journey’s best selling album is a greatest hits package which I also have on vinyl).  But Escape was massive in 1981.  Not much sold more than this album.  It’s easy to see why, it’s packaged with mega hits, including one track that became the highest selling digital music track of all time – by anyone (Don’t Stop Believin’).

This is one of the earliest albums I can remember buying in my life.  I was 16 at the time, and at the time this was new(ish), I was all about my then new Sony Walkman.  So I got on the bus, rode to Sears, and bought both Journey Escape & Hall & Oates’ Private Eyes on cassette tape.  I don’t have either of those versions still, but I have a very strong memory of buying them, and how cool I thought it was riding back home on the bus listening to music like that.  In 1981 this was some revolutionary shit!  Somewhere along the line I bought it on CD, and I still have that version, but in 2022, I saw there was a special “clear vinyl” variant released by Walmart (at a fair price), so I snapped it up (it was a 2021 pressing).  That’s what I’ll be listening to today.  My wife also loves this album – she as a teenager had the major hots for Steve Perry – posters of him in her bedroom and all that.  She still has her CD copy – so we technically have two of them still in 2024.  She also informed me that she had three separate copies of it on cassette tape as she wore out two of them from overplay.  :)

Journey themselves were at what people would call peak or “Classic” Journey.  As was said overall, this was their seventh album, and they’d undergone extensive lineup changes already.  The original lineup of the band only had two members still in it at this point (guitar & bass).  Perry is technically the third singer in Journey’s history at this point.  They were on their second keyboardist and their third drummer.  But this was the most stable and most productive lineup in the band’s history.  They have 15 studio albums (and an EP)  in full, but this period with Perry was their most fruitful, and none bigger than the Escape album.  My wife and I differ on our opinions of this being the “best” period of the band (I feel it’s later with Pineda musically), but that disagreement aside.. Even I can’t deny the power that the Escape album had.

For good reason, it has a ton of great songs on it.  Lets get to them.

Don’t Stop Believin’ – A 5 out of 5.  Hard to come up with a better album opener than this song. As mentioned before, it’s the biggest selling digital track by anyone ever.  As I had the experience of this album when it was BRAND NEW, whenever I listen to it, I’m taken back to my teenage years, and can re-live that part of my life again.  This was rock to me at this point (as I wasn’t quite yet into metal).  It has an amazing reach, it has continued to be popular over the decades too, and not just from the legacy standpoint of the song.  It’s found its own shelf life a few times, one of which when it was used in the final episode of the Sopranos.  In the early parts of the song that are more mellow you can hear Steve Perry’s buttery smooth vocals – which then morph into the version that goes with the full band. Man this song shows his vocal range.

Stone In Love – This is my wife’s favorite song off the album.  So much so the opening guitar riff is her ringtone on my phone.  The stereo aspect of the opening riff which comes out of solely the right speaker at one point has always caused us to point at that speaker in the car when that moment happens in the song. Great fat bottom end that runs underneath the entire song – Ross Valory showing up here. The middle of the song has some really great Neil Schon shredding – it’s a great track.  Has a power and guitar sound you don’t expect when it starts.

Who’s Crying Now – This was actually the first single off the album – and it’s a slower track.  Not SLOW by any stretch, but compared to the first two songs on the album, it’s a slower one for sure.  Which makes it (for me) an odd choice for first single.  The combination of bass notes with a piano that live behind Steve’s vocals is a great sound.  It never gets too high in terms of its music.  But Neil’s guitar work towards the end is just as smooth as Steve’s vocals.  It’s a brutally effective combination.  Was of course super popular, but not my favorite track on the album.  One of the only songs not to have a co-write by Neil Schon – which would explain the vibe here.

Keep on Runnin – We start off with another great Neil guitar riff.  This one is more of a guitar oriented track than the others to this point.  Which of course is something I like.  Steve does some extended notes in his vocals here.  Not quite Tom Jones Thunderball long, but they do some recording tricks and have Steve Perry do background vocals for himself – at least that’s what it sounds like to me.  This one’s mostly about Neil’s guitar, though.  Nothing wrong with that.

Still They Ride – This song is the big slow song of the album – one that definitely counts as a slow burn.  It starts off with just bass and vocals.  The rest of the band slowly comes in during the song, but even at its peak – it’s not a super fast song at all.  It has Steve’s soaring vocals as the driving force through most of it.  When people think of this album, they rightly think of things like Don’t Stop or Stone in Love first (or the hideously awful Open Arms).  But they should pay more attention to Still They Ride.  There’s some supremely great playing on this track, and I adore what Steve does with his vocal delivery on this track especially on the part that says “on wheels of fire”, and there’s another part where it”s just Steve with no music at all.  Great track – it ends up with some great guitar work by Neil as well.  Give this song some love, it deserves the attention.

Escape – The title track leads off Side 2.  Great mix of guitar and piano in this.  Another track that doesn’t get a ton of attention.  Not quite how to describe this track.  It’s got parts of all the band in it, it’s a great mix of the specific talents of Perry / Schon / Cain / Valory / Smith.  The beat that runs through the whole thing is another of those ones that gets me doing air drums with my feet while sitting at my desk.  Love the vocal delivery during this – “Ooh / I’ll run away / Yes I’m on my way”.

Lay It Down – Even though I love this album, this is my own personally overlooked song.  When I hear the album, I like it, I enjoy it, but when I think of songs from the Escape album, I never think of this one intentionally.  Another guitar driven song (always good).  Some of the guitar riffs here remind me a little of an earlier time in the band (those first three Journey albums that were something different).  Not the song as a whole, just parts of the guitar work.  But it too has more Schon shredding going on – I should pay more attention to this track, as it’s way high up on the guitar quota.  Steve Perry seems to sing in a higher range in this song than most – like he’s up at that “peak” vocal level and never seems to come back from it in this one.

Dead or Alive – Starts off with a drum beat – not something that’s done a lot in this era of Journey.  It’s a faster paced song.  Starts fast and keeps going.  Drum beat, piano sound – great rollicking track.  The entire band plays here of course, but it’s not any one instrument that is the driving force here, I feel it’s the overall beat that drives this song.  Lyrics are a bit odd, about a hitman for hire, seems like an odd choice for them.  But I adore the faster pace here, my favorite kind of song as you’ll know if you’ve read these reviews of mine.  Smoking hot track.  Wish there was more like this in their catalog.

Mother, Father – The best deep cut from the track.  My wife adores this song, as do I, and if I thought Still They Ride was a song that needed more attention, it is nothing compared to Mother Father.  Most people don’t ever talk about this song.  Starts off slow, comes in with a big bang of power in the chorus.  Steve’s vocals during the delivery of “Mother Father” in the lyrics appeals to me the most on this track.  I also love how Steve changes his delivery from slow and deliberate to operatic and sometimes fast in the span of a few lines of lyric – great vocal dexterity by him in this track.  After reading this article, my wife texted me to remind me that Steve’s vocals for this song were done in one take.

Open Arms – UGH.  I hate this song. I never liked it from the first time I heard it, and I continue to dislike it to this day.  I know that’s an outlier, as it’s one of their most popular/well known songs.  Personally it was the “last dance” song for my High School prom, and it was at that time, and the one time I saw Journey live that I didn’t skip the song because I couldn’t.  In fact, for this listen, I didn’t even play the track – I ended the album after Mother Father as it’s the last song, so it’s quite easily skipped. For the record, I feel exactly the same way about Faithfully from the next album. Bleargh.

A quick word about videogames…  The album’s success garnered a crap ton of attention – one of which was into the world of video games.  There was an Atari 2600 game called ‘Journey Escape“. It’s arguably bad (OK it IS bad), but it’s the kind of thing that happens when something is hella successful like this album was.  You basically had to avoid all kinds of things that were connected to the band (groupies, managers) and make it back to your “Scarab” (the ship on the cover).  It had a small part of music from the album at the start – but it was super easy and got boring fairly quickly, IMO. I actually still have one of these cartridges in 2024.  I bought it back when it was new because well the Atari 2600 was also mega popular at the time, and of course – sure.  Was a new and unique idea back then.  I’ve embedded two videos for this – one was an original 1982 TV commercial, and another showing a few minutes of the game play.

The album is 43 years old now as I write this, and it still holds up.  Open Arms aside, I love everything on this album, and it still works in 2024 as well as it did when I first heard it back in 1981.  Fantastic piece of music.  On the off chance you’ve read this entire article and don’t know the album, do your ears a favor and go listen to it. A note for my wife, who I know will read this.  This should show you I do like this album – I just like other parts of Journey’s catalog more.

Don’t stop…  Believin’……

P.S.  After I sent this review to my wife to read, she came out to the living room and made me put the album on a second time so she could hear it while she worked on Thanksgiving dinner.  :)