Songoftheday 10/27/15 - And through the years i will be a friend for always and forever, call on me and i'll be there for you...

"Honestly" - Stryper
from the album To Hell With The Devil (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #23 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8

Today's song of the day comes from the Christian "metal" band Stryper, who came together in lily-white suburbia of Orange County, California in the early 80s, with brothers Michael and Robert Sweet along with guitarist Oz Fox and Tim Gaines on bass (Poison's CC Deville was an early member). Changing their name to reference an Old Testament verse (which showed up on their album covers), the band released their debut EP The Yellow and Black Attack in 1984. They followed with a full length effort the next year, Soldiers Under Command, which ended up selling over a half a million copies. With a fanbase rivaling the best of their more, ahem, secular peers, and with a strong vocalist like Michael (who sounds quite a bit like Dennis DeYoung from Styx), their pinnacle came with their third album, To Hell With The Devil. Released in 1986, the album reached the top-40, sold over a million copies, and got major MTV airplay with the single "Calling On You". After another video hit with "Free", Stryper took the textbook metal move and released a "power-ballad", "Honestly". Written by Michael and produced by the band with Stephan Galfas, the song was vague enough to be used by many a non-church-goer trying to get into a young girls' pants...

"Honestly" became Stryper's sole top-40 pop hit in the U.S. in January of 1988. Later that year, the band released another album, In God We Trust, which also reached the top-40, and spun off two more minor pop hits with the similar "Always There For You" and "I Believe In You". And although like many a hair-metal band their radio success came to a halt at the end of the decade, their albums continued to sell pretty decently, even reaching the top-40 with their No More Hell To Pay record in 2013.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


...and here's the band performing live in concert in 2007...

Up tomorrow: A fractured bi-national band is going places.