Songfacts' Carl Wiser reports:
On Judas Priest's 1982 album, Screaming For Vengeance - the one with "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" - every track was written by their creative triumvirate of Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, except one. "(Take These) Chains" came courtesy of Bob Halligan Jr., an American songwriter who was just getting his start. It happened again on Priest's next album when they recorded Halligan's "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll" as the only track by an outsider.
Writing two songs recorded by Judas Priest gave Bob big-time metal bona fides, so other bands sought his services. He wrote for Kix, Blue Öyster Cult, even KISS. Then he took a pivot to pop (Cher, Michael Bolton) and CCM (Bob Carlisle, Rebecca St. James) before landing on Celtic rock with his own band, the fabulous Ceili Rain (pronounced Kay-Lee). How did Bob get from Judas Priest to Ceili Rain by way of Michael Bolton? To find out, we had him take us through some key songs in chronological order.
After an upbringing in Central New York, Bob lived in New York City and Nashville before returning to Syracuse in 2003, where he taught songwriting at Syracuse University for 12 years. He's quite good at explaining how to write a successful song in a range of genres (the trick with CCM: make the narrator flawed) and revealing the layers of meaning beneath his lyrics. Turns out one of those Judas Priest songs is a Cold War analogy."
The following excerpt focuses on Bob's work with KISS...
Carl Wiser (Songfacts): "'Rise To It' by KISS. A very different song from 'Don't Close Your Eyes' (Kix)."
Halligan: "Yeah, basically a boner joke. I was staying with my friend Graham Shaw, who's another singer-songwriter in Canada, and got the word that I was going to have a writing appointment with Paul Stanley. So I got immediately inspired to go into a kind of method acting - you try to imagine that you're one of the people in these groups. I don't think I was thinking of Paul or Gene, but just a generic KISS persona.
"A lot of times with songwriting, you create a punchline and then you create the story that leads up to it that makes it funny or makes it land. Sometimes the punchline arrives as you're creating the story that's leading up to it. Other times, you work backwards. More commonly we work backwards, particularly in the Nashville world where you start with a title or an idea and then think, how do we set that up?
"I have a feeling that I had the "rise to it" line. A lot of times, the vocal is a duet with the instrument you're writing the song on, so "rise to it," then the guitar... "you know I really can do it."
"So there's a back and forth. You like to have them sort of answer each other and complement each other. Once I had the first verse and chorus and the intro, I said, 'Geez, these guys are grownups.' You know, some of the hard-rock guys, especially when they're very young, you can hand them what essentially is a great song or the beginnings of a hit, and they're not into it because they don't feel ownership of it and they just want to play fast guitar riffs, whereas I knew Gene and Paul were bringing me in because they wanted to have hit records, and if they heard something they felt was that or could become that, they would jump on it, and that's exactly what happened with 'Rise To It'. Paul came to my apartment, I played him the intro, first verse and the chorus, and then back to the intro and repeated the verse and the chorus. He said, 'Man, that's great. Let's finish it.'"
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