Journey Time 3

The Essential Journey doesn't bear a title that's too hyperbolic for the collection it represents. Over the course of two discs and 32 songs, the retrospective winds through all of the group's biggest songs – not just the hit singles, but the album radio favorites and concert staples that kept the group popular on the charts and in the arenas until last third of the '80s (and, for the record, everything on the previous Greatest Hits record is here). The key to the collection is that it doesn't abide strict chronological order. Instead, it's divided into two, with all the biggest hits on the first disc and the second acting like a "more of the best" collection, and within each of the discs, the tracks flow like a concert. The result is a first-class, definitive collection for the serious Journey listener (and, despite many skeptics, there are many out there – which is not hard to understand, since arena rock never got any better than this).

Greatest Hits is a compilation album by the American rock band Journey, originally released in 1988 by Columbia Records. It is the band's best-selling career disc, spending 330 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart (more than any other compilation album, except for Bob Marley's 'Legend' disc, in history). Additionally, as of late 2014, it has logged nearly 1,000 weeks on Billboard's Catalog albums chart.

Escape was a groundbreaking album for San Francisco's Journey, charting three singles inside Billboard's Top Ten, with "Don't Stop Believing" reaching number nine, "Who's Crying Now" number four, and "Open Arms" peaking at number two and holding there for six weeks. Escape flung Journey steadfastly into the AOR arena, combining Neal Schon's grand yet palatable guitar playing with Jonathan Cain's blatant keyboards. All this was topped off by the passionate, wide-ranged vocals of Steve Perry, who is the true lifeblood of this album, and this band. The songs on Escape are more rock-flavored, with more hooks and a harder cadence compared to their former sound. "Who's Crying Now" spotlights the sweeping fervor of Perry's voice, whose theme about the ups and downs of a relationship was plentiful in Journey's repertoire…

Your Hit Parade – was a 41-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early 1990s, spotlighting popular music from the pre-rock era years of 1940-1954, and non-rock and roll songs from 1955 through mid-1960s.
Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Your Hit Parade" series covered a specific time period, including single years in some volumes and stylistic trends in others.

Arriving 11 years after 2011's Eclipse, Freedom is Journey's 15th studio effort and their third outing with vocalist Arnel Pineda. It also marks the return of Raised on Radio bassist Randy Jackson, who stepped in after the band's abrupt split with founding member Ross Valory in 2020. Journey's post-Steve Perry releases have been reliable yet unremarkable, with showrunners Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain attempting to wring out every last bit of headband sweat from the group's chart-topping heydays. That trend continues on Freedom, a relentlessly anthemic and underwhelming set filled with over-the-counter power ballads and bloated AOR rockers that do very little to earn a 70-minute runtime. The performances, however, are top-notch, with Narada Michael Walden and former member Deen Castronovo sharing drum duties, Schon flexing his still impressive melodic-lead muscles…