Solo and Loving It: 5 Lead Singers of 80s Bands Who Scored Hits on Their Own

In the 80s, the pop music brass ring was sim­ply too tempt­ing for artists to ignore. In many cas­es, artists who had made their name as lead singers in suc­cess­ful rock bands stepped out on their own to try for big hits under their own name.

Most of these artists only man­aged one hit sin­gle or a few before even­tu­al­ly return­ing to their band. Nonethe­less, they man­aged to make an impact on their own away from the safe cocoon of their larg­er out­fit.

Jour­ney enjoyed their great­est suc­cess in the ear­ly 80s with the one-two punch of the albums Escape and Fron­tiers. They decid­ed to take a lit­tle bit of a break right after, giv­ing Steve Per­ry, the band’s gold­en voice, the chance to try out a solo record. Street Talk con­tained four Top 40 sin­gles, although the oth­er three didn’t make quite the same impact as “Oh Sher­rie”. The tit­u­lar girl in ques­tion was Perry’s girl­friend, Sher­rie Swaf­ford. This song came with one of those videos-with­in-the-video that was all the rage at the time.

Mike Reno of Lover­boy and Ann Wil­son of Heart

We’re giv­ing you a two-for-one with this one from the Foot­loose sound­track. Well, if you include the writer, it’s three-for-one. Eric Car­men, once lead singer of the pow­er-pop­ping Rasp­ber­ries, wrote the music, with Dean Pitch­ford han­dling the lyrics. The two singers for this pow­er bal­lad came into the project at dif­fer­ent pop­u­lar­i­ty lev­els. Ann Wilson’s band Heart had been strug­gling, although they’d soon go nuclear with the help of out­side song­writ­ers. Mean­while, Lover­boy, Mike Reno’s band, was at the tip­py-top of their com­mer­cial pow­er in ‘84.

Den­nis DeY­oung of Styx

Styx deliv­ered one of their biggest-ever hit albums in 1983 with Kil­roy Was Here, sparked by the unfor­get­table sin­gle “Mr. Roboto”. But bad blood rose up between lead singer Den­nis DeY­oung, who had come up with the Kil­roy con­cept, and the oth­er mem­bers of the band, who object­ed to the artis­tic direc­tion. DeY­oung didn’t sit around mop­ing. Instead, he knocked off a solo album. And he dis­played his unerr­ing touch on the bal­lads with the bit­ter­sweet nos­tal­gia of “Desert Moon”.

Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr of The Cars

The Cars hit their high­est com­mer­cial peaks on the 1984 album Heart­beat City. By that time, the band had been bash­ing away at it steadi­ly for the bet­ter part of a decade. It made sense that they’d take a lit­tle bit of time away from each oth­er fol­low­ing that. Both of the band’s lead singers struck out on their own with sol­id suc­cess. Ric Ocasek hit with the dreamy bal­lad “Emo­tions In Motion”. And Ben Orr came through with “Stay The Night”, a moody win­ner that he also helped to write, some­thing he didn’t get to do with The Cars.