It’s been nearly 40 years since Journey released a compilation album that continues to take space on the Billboard charts. The album, Journey’s Greatest Hits, was released in November 1988. It featured the iconic California rock band’s biggest songs up to that date with their most successful lead singer, Steve Perry.
As of May 23, 2026, the classic rock album has been on the Billboard 200 album chart for 909 weeks, ranking at No. 76 on the coveted list. Journey’s classic rock chart success is bested only by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon run at over 990 total weeks and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Legend, which currently sits at 935 weeks.
Journey’s Greatest Hits features an iconic list of songs from the band’s biggest commercial heyday, including “Wheel in the Sky,” “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Faithfully,” “Any Way You Want It,” “Open Arms,” and more.
The greatest hits album was originally released just after Perry temporarily left the band in 1987. He returned to Journey in the mid-1990s, only to quit again in 1998, per Ultimate Classic Rock. Journey forged on with Perry soundalike singers Steve Augeri and Arnel Pineda, the latter of whom has been the band’s frontman since 2007.
While he joined his former Journey bandmates onstage at their 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Perry did not perform with them.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, founding guitarist Neal Schon described the reunion with Perry as “surreal” and “very emotional.” “Knowing everything else and how he was feeling – he was very emotional too – it’s understandable to me that he wouldn’t want to sing. It was just highly emotional,” he shared.
Schon also provided insight into why a greatest hits album of Journey’s early material with Perry continues to thrive decades later.
“Back in the day, when we would get lumped in with every band that was successful at that time from the 1980s, I would think to myself, ‘You know what, I disagree. We have something really unique,’” Schon said. “When you look at a lot of our early records like Infinity, it was so brand new and fresh and organic.”
Perry has also spoken about Journey’s ‘80s hits. In an interview with Dan Rather for AXS TV, he noted that the 1981 song “Open Arms” marked a change for the band.
“I would say it was a big change because it was a ballad, it was a beautiful melodic song, but when it came time to record the song, I think there were trepidations of doing that kind of music. That it might be a little too slow for a band that wants to rock,” he said. “So we intentionally kind of met in the middle to try to make it bombastically big, which became a style of music called a power ballad later on. Which I’m not saying we created, but we certainly had our part in it.”
As for the band’s massive hit, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Perry said it took on “a life of its own” after it was featured on the finale of The Sopranos. The song’s TV cameo sparked a surge of digital downloads, which has also helped fuel the Greatest Hits album’s continued success.
