Singer Steve Perry said the chorus popped into his head while driving to Los Angeles, which he recorded on his personal mini cassette player.

Once he arrived in LA, he went straight to keyboardist Jonathan Cain's house to show him the work in progress.

[2] At the end of the song, Neal Schon plays a repeating guitar solo that sounds similar to Santana.

According to Schon on In the Studio with Redbeard (which devoted an entire episode to the making of Escape), originally he recorded an aggressive, experimental guitar solo which he liked but Perry and Cain did not.

Billboard praised "Who's Crying Now" as "one of Journey's strongest and classiest records," and "one of the most appealing love songs" of 1981.