Don't Close Your Eyes

"Don't Close Your Eyes" is one of the more soulful and meaningful songs in the hair metal milieu. It's an anti-suicide song with gut-wrenchingly frank lyrics delivered with tonsil-blistering intensity by the roaring banshee vocals of Steve Whiteman. Seriously, try watching the video and breathing along with Steve. If you can even take a breath that deep, you're not a smoker.

Kix bass player Donnie Purnell was their main songwriter. He usually collaborated with writers outside the band, which was the case here, where he worked with John Palumbo from the band Crack The Sky and Bob Halligan Jr., who made his mark writing songs for Judas Priest ("(Take These) Chains," "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll") and started co-writing with Purnell on Kix' 1985 album Midnite Dynamite. "Donnie came to New York City with a few songs he had started, one of which was 'Don't Close Your Eyes,' which he had started with John Palumbo," Halligan told Songfacts. They had it pretty well along, and he played it for me. I thought it was great. They had the chorus going already, and he knew it was, 'Don't close your eyes...' Then I came up with, 'Don't sing your last lullaby,' the lyrics and the melody and the chords for that part to finish the chorus. And then a lot of the guitar stuff, the intro and the guitar solo, was stuff that I came up with, but other than my line there, Donnie really did the rest of the lyrics." "I love that it's ultimately an anti-suicide song," he added. "He's trying to keep this person awake who has hit the panic button and done that emergency error of taking pills. It's something you can feel proud of contributing to. At the end of the day, that's what I hope I will have done: give the world some stuff that it wants or needs." Halligan took a turn to adult contemporary and CCM music in the '90s, writing for the likes of Cher and Bob Carlisle. He formed the Celtic Rock band Ceili Rain in 1995.

"Don't Close Your Eyes" is far and away the biggest hit for Kix, which formed in Hagerstown, Maryland and made a name for themselves playing up and down the Atlantic Coast. They were signed to Atlantic Records, but their first three albums had little impact - their only song to chart was "Body Talk" in 1983... at #104! But as was often the case with hair metal bands, a power ballad was their biggest hit. "Don't Close Your Eyes" wasn't typical of their sound, but it found an audience, a welcome relief for the band after a decade of struggle. The song helped the Blow My Fuse sell over a million copies, but by the time they released their next album in 1991, grunge was big and Kix lost their spark. They split up in 1996 and regrouped in 2003 minus Donnie Purnell. Steve Whiteman also started giving voice lessons; his most famous student is Lzzy Hale from the band Halestorm.