Great Forgotten Songs #12 – Kiss “Turn On The Night”

The Kiss song is from their 1987 studio album Crazy Nights. The song was written by Paul Stanley and Diane Warren. As she says she hadn’t written many hits yet, but Paul Stanley believed in her.

Stanley in its turn says that it was Warren who came up with the title for the future song and that she played the key role in its writing.

Crazy Nights was Kiss’ 14th studio album and was recorded from March to June 1987 and released on September 18, 1987 by Mercury and Vertigo in Europe. This was the second album to feature the new line-up of Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Bruce Kulick, and Eric Carr.

Hear the song below:

“Turn On The Night” by Kiss

Crazy Nights (1987)

It featured keyboards, which was another departure in their music style, changing from their Creatures of the Night/Lick It Up/Animalize/Asylum heavy metal sound into a more radio friendly sound. It was re-released in 1998 as part of the Kiss Remasters series, it is the last Kiss album to have been remastered.

A relatively high number of songs from Crazy Nights were performed live during its supporting tour, but during and especially immediately following the tour, most of those songs were dropped and were never performed again.

Only the song “Crazy Crazy Nights” was retained in their setlist for the Hot in the Shade Tour which followed a couple years later; it was dropped after that tour and would not return for nearly 20 years until the Sonic Boom Over Europe Tour.

This makes the album one of the least represented in the bands’ entire catalog over the course of their career in their setlists, behind only their 1981 album commercial flop Music from “The Elder”.

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