Jonathan Cain recently released his Christmas single ‘Wonder of Wonders’ to the world. This coincides with an extremely busy schedule that includes the release of the ‘Unsung Noel with Jonathan Cain’ concert that is available exclusively through Amazon Prime Video. It also includes hosting ABC’s Rock & Reelz Thanksgiving weekend radio special and playing some selected dates for his Don’t Stop Believin’ Family Christmas Tour. That in itself would make for an extremely busy calendar and probably satisfy any musician. Cain will not stop there, however. He’s gearing up to join his Journey bandmates to headline a major 60+ city North American tour with The Pretenders.
Despite his enormously busy schedule, I was able to catch up with Jonathan to talk about everything from Wonder of Wonders to his Faith to the songwriting backstory of some of Journey’s biggest songs to playing in multiple bands with John Waite to a phone call conversation he had with Prince. It was a jammed packed conversation with a lot of detail. Being a fan of Journey for as long as I can remember and having cherished my vinyl copies of Escape and Frontiers for so long, this was very much a treat for this interviewer.
With so much music happening during the Holidays, I asked Jonathan if this was his favorite time of the year. He tells Sound Vapors, “I’ve been writing Christmas music for a while and it started with my kids at their school and it seemed like a natural progression to continue the tradition of trying to write songs that are original. I think Christmas music is so stale, :laughs: so I tried to write a few new songs to liven up the season!” We continued on to his latest Christmas release, Wonder of Wonders, which was recorded at his studio, Addiction Sound and I asked him how the song and collaboration with Michael Tate of Newsboys came about. Cain says, “My friend Ian Eskelin, it was his idea and we’d been wanting to hook up and write. 
He’s sort of a fan of my music and what I’ve been doing and I’m a fan of what he does. So we contacted Michael and we got Tony Wood, who had the title and brought some lyrics in and off we went. It happened very effortlessly and it was as spontaneous as you can get. It was a Holy Spirit moment. I like to write songs like that. I mean, I wrote Faithfully in a half an hour. There was no more than two hours total and the melody came out of me in about five minutes. I sat down at Ian’s piano and that’s what I came up with. We didn’t change a thing. I thought Michael and I would sound good together and I was pleasantly surprised. The blend is so good.”
Sometimes the best songs happen that way and are less contrived than people think. A good example is the monster Journey classic, Don’t Stop Believin’. I asked Jonathan how that song happened. How it was born. He tells me, “It came from my Father. He was giving me encouragement over the phone. I was struggling in Hollywood with my solo career and I asked him if I should come home to Chicago and give it up. He said, Son, don’t stop believing. I’ve got a plan, we have a vision. So I wrote it down and kept it sort of like a prayer for many years. Then when they needed another song for the Journey album, Steve (Perry) said, go look in that lyric book of yours, there must be something there and there it was, what my father had said. So then Holy Spirit gave me a chorus in a hurry that night. I wrote the chorus in about five minutes and then I brought the chorus in. The rest, the band did all together. We improved it and made it happen. So.. pretty great.” Boy, I’ll say. All around, great.
It is pretty amazing that he is able to keep writing not only at a high level but with such quickness. It’s clear that Jonathan is deeply inspired by his Faith but also very grateful. He’s done so many projects with so much success, it’s hard to doubt that there is a higher power involved. In the complete interview available on the podcast, we expand upon both subjects and even chat about his time with John Waite in The Babys and Bad English and Jonathan explains how that reunion with Waite happened.
One of my favorite parts of the interview was his story about the time Prince called him about a song he was about to release. Prince was worried that the song may have come a little too close to the Cain penned, Journey hit, Faithfully. Jonathan explains, “So Prince calls me and says, I’ll change it, Jonathan. If you’re offended, I’ll change it. Tell Neal I’m sorry, I didn’t realize what I was doing. I just tagged it on one night and I woke up and I said, “oh wow, what did I do?” Jonathan continues, “I said, Sir, you’re gonna have a hit with this song, it’s going to be huge.”
That song was Purple Rain.
You can hear the rest of that story as well as my entire conversation with Jonathan Cain by clicking on one of the links below to your favorite place to listen to podcasts. This was an absolute pleasure to hear these stories straight from Jonathan. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
-Tommy Marz
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