By 1982, Journey was still riding the waves of their No. 1 album Escape, released a year earlier, but all was not well within the band. Guitarist Neal Schon and bassist Ross Valory were both in the middle of a divorce and their bandmates wanted to try to reveal some of the positives of the situation.
That year, bandmates Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry began writing a song reflecting the difficulties their bandmates were struggling with at the time and wrote “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” while the band was on tour.
“Usually we don’t write songs that far in advance of an album,” said Cain in 1983. “But on that occasion, Steve and I were just working an idea backstage and it all came together.”
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[RELATED: 4 Songs You Didn’t Know Steve Perry Wrote for Other Artists]
Instead of writing a despondent ballad, “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” was an uplifting song about recognizing a love that has ended and being determined to find it once again.
Here we stand
Worlds apart, hearts broken in two, two, two
Sleepless nights
Losing ground, I’m reaching for you, you, you
Someday love will find you
True love won’t desert you
You know I still love you
Though we touched and went our separate ways
Within a day, Cain and Perry presented their song to the rest of the band, and they started fleshing it out during soundcheck. Soon after, Journey started plugging “Separate Ways” into their nightly sets, and the song immediately connected with the audience before the band had a chance to record it.
“It doesn’t matter where we put this song because it has always had a strong effect on the audience, all the way back to the first time we played it—before it was even recorded,” said Schon in 2008. “It was written on tour and we threw it in the set to see how it would go down. The audience had an amazing reaction to it without even knowing what it was.
Released as the lead single off Journey’s 1983 album Frontiers, “Separate Ways” was a hit for the band and went to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
‘Stranger’ Covers
While watching the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things in 2022, Chris Daughtry was captivated by “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” when he heard it playing in an episode. He immediately wanted to cover the Journey classic as a duet and called on Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale and the two recorded it.
Coincidentally, the duo’s 2023 release of “Separate Ways” also marked the 40th anniversary of the release of the song and Journey’s landmark album Frontiers. “I didn’t even think about it,” Daughtry told American Songwriter in 2023. “We didn’t set it there for inspiration or as a muse or whatever—it was just there. The 40th anniversary thing, I had no idea about it until after we had recorded it.”
[RELATED: Daughtry and Lzzy Hale Talk Covering Journey’s “Separate Ways”]
Remixed by Bryce Miller for the season 4 trailer and cliffhanger of Stranger Things, Perry said he was hesitant at first to feature the song on the show. “I was sent this trailer version, and I was absolutely stunned by the feeling that I got from it,” said Perry in 2022. “Because it was so organic and analogy, and I was stunned that the vocal was emotionally that good.”
Perry added, “When Bryce started arranging it, he took certain melody things that were always there, like guitar lines or things that we had worked on back in the day, and just expanded on them in a different way, and so it became a new version of itself, emotionally. I mean, I knew it was good, but I didn’t think it was that emotional.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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