An artist’s lowest moments can sometimes produce their highest peaks of creativity, and that was certainly the case for Jim Morrison, who wrote what would become a signature Doors song while in a depressive episode in Los Angeles. Feeling wayward and lonely, Morrison took a walk up to the ridge of Laurel Canyon on the advice of his bandmates, Robby Krieger and John Densmore.
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Looking down at the city from this sky-high vantage point, Morrison had a revelation about the world around him.
Jim Morrison Wrote the Chorus to the Signature Song in Minutes
In a 2025 retrospective with Guitar World, guitarist Robby Krieger recalled Jim Morrison visiting the apartment Krieger was living in with The Doors drummer, John Densmore. “He was in one of his suicidal, downer moods,” Krieger recalled. “So John said, ‘Come on, Jim. We’ll go see the sunset. That’ll get you out of this.’ We went up to the top of Laurel Canyon, and it was incredibly beautiful. We were looking down on the sun reflecting off the top of the clouds.”
This literal change in perspective changed something within Morrison, too. Suddenly, the singer said, “Wow! Now I know why I felt like that. It’s because if you’re strange, people are strange.” Thus, the title for what would become one of The Doors’ signature songs, “People Are Strange,” was born. Krieger gave Morrison some time alone on Appian Way, walking back to his apartment where he and Densmore waited for their once-sullen frontman to return. When Morrison did come back, he was a different man from the one who had been pacing the floor, lamenting about how “f***ed up” everything was.
“He was euphoric,” Densmore recalled in his memoir, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors. Morrison sang the lines to the song’s chorus for his bandmates. “When you’re strange, faces come out in the rain. When you’re strange, no one remembers your name.” Densmore recalled Morrison saying, “I feel really good about this one. It just came to me all of a sudden in a flash as I was sitting up there on the ridge looking out over the city. I scribbled it down as fast as I could. It felt great to be writing again.”
The Doors Knew They Had a Hit on Their Hands
The benefits of Jim Morrison writing “People Are Strange” were, at the very least, twofold. First, the songwriting process from Morrison’s high vantage point on Laurel Canyon helped pull him out of a funk that Robby Krieger and John Densmore weren’t quite sure how to handle. Morrison had a tempestuous attitude, and more often than not, the band left him to his own devices to sort himself and level out. But Morrison’s time on the canyon ridge wasn’t just therapeutic. His song would become one of The Doors’ signature tunes, peaking at No. 12 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on Canada’s RPM Top Singles chart.
As Densmore recalled in his memoir, Krieger’s ears perked up the first time he heard Morrison sing the words scribbled on his crumpled piece of paper. “He knew a hit when he heard one,” Densmore wrote. “That melody has a nice hook,” Krieger said.
Ultimately, everyone was right. People are strange when you’re a stranger. And Morrison’s song about that fact of life, which they released on September 4, 1967, was a hit.
Photo by Edmund Teske/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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