Shout It Out Loud

Before forming Kiss, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had a band called Wicked Lester that included a Hollies song called "I Wanna Shout" in their set. The chorus goes: We wanna shout it out loud But we can't let people know Wicked Lester recorded the song with the title "We Want To Shout It Out Loud," but their version wasn't released. A few years later, when Kiss were working on their fourth album, Destroyer, Simmons came up with a variation on the lyric, singing, "Shout it, shout it, shout it out loud." He, Stanley, and their producer, Bob Ezrin, put fleshed out the song in about 30 minutes, turning into a wild party tune that became one of Kiss' anthems.

Simmons, Stanley and Bob Ezrin wrote the song at Ezrin's apartment in New York City with all three of them sitting at a piano. They wrote the songs for the album at their various apartments and spent a lot of time rehearsing them before heading into the studio to record. Destroyer was the first Kiss album Ezrin worked on; he was far more knowledgeable about music than the band and did a lot of teaching in their time together, even using a blackboard and pointer. Kiss had a substantial following at this point, but it was mostly young boys. They knew Ezrin could polish their sound and expand their audience, and he did: the album was a huge hit and got them to the next level.

Simmons and Stanley trade lines on the verses and both come in on the chorus, which is just the title repeated: Shout it, shout it, shout it out loud Shout it, shout it, shout it out loud