Journey

Journey did not begin as the band on the karaoke list. They began as a players’ band, an offshoot of Santana’s orbit, built around the guitar of Neal Schon and a taste for long instrumental stretches that owed more to fusion and prog than to anything you would call a hook. The early records are restless, technical, and largely sung past rather than sung to. They impressed musicians. They did not move the room.

The turn came in 1977. A singer named Steve Perry joined for the album Infinity, and almost overnight the band’s centre of gravity moved from the fretboard to the voice. Perry had a tenor that could open a stadium roof, and Journey rebuilt themselves around it: tighter songs, bigger choruses, melodies engineered to be sung back by tens of thousands of people who had never met. Across the late seventies and into the eighties they became one of the most reliable hit machines in American rock.

Perry would not be the last voice. The band carried on through later frontmen, Steve Augeri among them, and most famously Arnel Pineda, a singer Schon found fronting a covers band on the internet. The lineup keeps changing. The chorus keeps landing.