George Harrison remembered a handy piece of songwriting advice John Lennon once gave him: “Once you start to write a song, try and finish it straight away while you’re in the mood.”
Harrison continued, “And I’ve learned from experience because you go back to it and then you’re in a whole different state of mind and it’s more difficult. Sometimes it’s easy, but on the whole, it’s more difficult to come back to something so I do try to finish them straight away.”
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‘Get Back’
While watching the Beatles‘ 2021 documentary Get Back, former Journey frontman Steve Perry was reminded of the same tried-and-true advice he’d always believed in.
“I was watching the Beatles doc Get Back, and John [Lennon] says the best time to sort them [songs] out is when you’re doing them,” Perry told American Songwriter, using his best imitation of Lennon.
“I always agreed with that,” Perry added, “Don’t put it off, because the best time is when they first show up. That’s when they’re alive. And you can sort them out pretty well at that moment.”
[RELATED: The Writer’s Block — American Songwriter Interview With Steve Perry (2022)]
Perry, who was with Journey from 1977 through 1987—and for a brief reunion in the ’90s—also co-wrote many of the band’s biggest hits, including “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Only the Young,” and “Anyway You Want It,” along with a catalog from his solo career from 1984 debut, Street Talk, and hits “Oh Sherrie,” and “Foolish Heart,” on through the mid-’90s with For the Love of Strange Medicine.
“I don’t think that people have even looked at the songwriting aspect,” said Perry in a 2020 interview with American Songwriter. “You can have vocal abilities, you can have a great band. But if you don’t have a song, you’re lost. What is the success of all these groups without songwriting? You gotta have a song first.”
Perry later stepped away from music for more than 20 years before returning with his third solo album Traces in 2018 and his first holiday album in 2021, The Season.
[RELATED: Steve Perry Shares Christmas Memories Around the Songs of ‘The Season’]
“When I left the music business, I was gone for about 25 years, and I had no intentions of coming back,” shared Perry in 2022. “In my heart, I truly had done everything that living the dream could have possibly been. And I really believe that’s true. We [Journey] were so successful, and we really had such a blast and we had such great songs the band, and I had some solo stuff that was great.”
He continued, “Then over 20 years go by and all of a sudden the creative juices just started to come back. I was a little trepidatious to put my toes back in the water because I left it so thoroughly. There are demons when you create music. By demons, I mean self-doubt, the questioning “Is that good enough?” The creative process can be painful.”
Photo: Steve Perry performs at the Palladium, July 8, 1979, in New York. (Ebet Roberts/Redferns)
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