Classic Songs To Rock The New Year!

“So tonight we gonna party like it’s 1999.”

The inspiration for the ’82 song came from a TV documentary Prince watched about Nostradamus. The film claimed Nostradamus predicted that a terror would fall upon the world in 1999.

The next day, Prince discussed the documentary with his bandmates, where they imagined a huge party would be thrown knowing this terror was about to happen. A day later. Prince came to the studio with song lyrics fully written.

Billy Idol’s late ’70’s Punk band Generation X were touring Japan when he and bassist Tony James visited a Tokyo discotheque and were struck by the sight of the young crowd dancing with their own reflections in mirrored walls rather than with one another.

Generation X were the first to release the song in 1980. Idol issued it as a solo single a year later.

.

Lennon chose the song as the lead single from “Double Fantasy,” because it was the most appropriate following his five-year absence from recording.

He did “tongue in cheek” impersonations of Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. Lennon explained, “I’m a born-again Rocker, I feel that refreshed, and I’m going right back to my roots.”

Keyboardist Jonathan Cain got the song title from encouragement his father gave him as a struggling musician living on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. 

Cain was ready to give up, and each time he would call home in despair, his father would tell him, “Don’t stop believing or you’re done, dude.”

Cain and vocalist Steve Perry created the story of two people leaving behind past lives and boarding a midnight train to anywhere.

The lyrics say it all…

“(Don’t stop me now) ’cause I’m having a good time.”

Guitarist Brian May originally didn’t like the song. But after hearing that it played at weddings, parties and other celebratory occasions, he came to appreciate the song’s ‘great joy’.

Written by Mars Bonfire (Dennis Edmonton), “Born to Be Wild” is described as the first Heavy Metal song due to the lyric “heavy metal thunder.”

A critic described the song as “a roaring anthem of turbo-charged riff Rock… that at once defines Steppenwolf’s sound and provided them with their shot (at) immortality”

According to GN’R guitarist Izzy Stradlin the song was “about Hollywood streets; true to life,” but it was inspired by an incident that occurred in New York. Singer Axl Rose and a friend encountered a homeless man while they were leaving the bus station. Trying to put a scare into the runaways, the man yelled, “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle baby; you’re gonna die!”

Originally intended to be a love song, the lyrics were reshaped and inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement,

Driven by Adam Clayton’s bass line, it’s the most serious song on the list but it is also the most hopeful… “Though torn in two, we can be one.”

.

Intended only to be a concert opener, it was the first single and title track from the band’s album of the same name.

The “countdown” aspect is perfect for New Year’s Eve.

Written by singer Joey Tempest, the song’s lyrics were inspired by David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” 

It’s a classic party song that opened countless Stones concerts,

“‘Start Me Up’ took about six hours to record,” noted session engineer Chris Kinsey. “If they all played the right chords in the right time, went to the chorus at the right time and got to the middle eight together, that was a master. They would never sit down and. work out a song. They would jam it and the song would evolve out of that. That’s their magic.”