As it finally did with Prodigal Son Perry after he walked away from his stadium-level supergroup Journey after nine albums, first in 1987, and then permanently in 1996 after suffering a reunion-tour-nixing hip injury in Hawaii. Point being: You can run from your past-or even your fated artistic destiny that’s irrevocably connected to it-only so far before it catches up to you. “It’s in there and a lot of the other songs, too.” And the whimsical vision reappears on new Traces and Alternate tracks like “We’re Still Here” (with its tales of “City boys and city girls running wild”), he adds. It would pop up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s definitive monster hit in 1981 “Don’t Stop Believin’” (“Just a small-town girl/ Living in a lonely world/ She took the midnight train going anywhere”). “And I could see straight down the Main Street of Hanford, Calif., and back then, it was a neon street, with neon lighting up an old town in a real American Graffiti kind of way, and you know, that vision never left me,” he swears. He then attached a heavy rock to his contraption, lofted it over the tallest limb, and shinnied up to an acme nook, where he nestled in to survey his surroundings. “And I was pretty industrious-I cut down all these other old trees in his back yard, drilled holes in the pieces, and used rope to make a rope ladder,” recalls the sleek-throated singer, who just released a companion volume to his 2018 Traces solo comeback, aptly dubbed Traces (Alternate Versions and Sketches). Staring up the huge sky-squelching pine tree in his grandfather’s front yard, next door to his family’s house, he simply sensed that there magical sights for the beholding available at its summit.

When ex-Journey frontman Steve Perry was a kid growing up in Central California, he remembers seeing sunny possibility where others saw only dark obstruction.

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