38 Special Hits A ‘Milestone’
Don Barnes talks about bringing the legendary band into 2025
During the 1980s, 38 Special was one of those bands that ruled both radio and MTV.
With the hits “Hold on Loosely,” “Caught Up in You,” “Rockin’ Into the Night,” “Wild-Eyed Southern Boys,” “If I’d Been the One,” “Second Chance” and many more, their songs have become cultural touchstones for music fans of that decade.
The band are still active, touring the world and, in September, releasing Milestone. It’s their first album in more than 20 years (their last, Drivetrain, came out in 2004).
“It was a long time coming,” says vocalist/guitarist Don Barnes, calling from a tour stop in Kansas. “We’re really excited about this release, and everything is cooking now. Milestone is just a continuation of everything we’ve been trying to do. We wanted a 2025 version of 38 Special.”
He points to the jaunty single “Slightly Controversial” as a good example of this updated sound.
“Of course, fans are always going to like it, but we were trying to garner a new audience,” he says. “We had an older fan base because we’ve been around so long, but that was nice that younger kids liked that song. That’s what it’s all about, enlarging your fan base and crowds.”
Barnes is the band’s main songwriter, but he let his bandmates contribute their ideas — and, in a poignant full-circle moment, he wrote some of these new songs with Jim Peterik, who’d helped him write the band’s signature hits “Hold On Loosely” and “Caught Up in You.”
“It was nice to go back and recreate that chemistry,” Barnes says of working with Peterik four decades after their initial successful creative partnership. “Songwriting shouldn’t be a drudgery, you know. You should have a few laughs, then a glass of wine, go out to dinner, that kind of thing. He’s always been a good song collaborator with me, and so we had a good time.”
Still, Barnes admits, making Milestone turned out to be “a pretty daunting task, trying to fit in studio time amongst all these cities we’re obligated to get to [on tour].” Because of this, the recording sessions were broken into eight different phases.
“And then it was up to me to fly to Chicago every month and do some overdubs and vocals and harmonies and all the guitar solos,” Barnes says, adding with a laugh, “Wrong place to be, Chicago in the middle of January! They had an ice storm. My rental car was out there, and I needed to get to the studio, so I’m scraping half an inch of ice off the windshield, thinking, ‘The things I go through for this band!’ But it’s what you’ve got to do: you’ve got to keep moving forward and pushing.”
While the recording process may have been a struggle at times, Barnes says that writing the songs in the first place was quite easy. “I found that my wife was a bit of a muse; it was a lot of her inspiration,” he says. “In your life, you finally get it right and there’s peace and you have a good relationship, so it was nice to draw from that.”
Exploring personal relationships has always been a specialty for 38 Special, though.
“We had always had the best luck with relationship songs,” Barnes says. “I think people sense the truth to them, because it really did happen. Some guy was like, ‘I feel just like what that guy is singing; he’s telling my story.’ And that’s what music should be, to make that connection. As an artist, you try to put something together that’s an expression of what’s in your heart, and somebody hears it and possibly puts it in their heart. That’s what happened all these years.”
38 Special has been together for more than five decades, after forming in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1974. But well before that, Barnes and guitarist Ronnie Van Zant had already become seasoned professionals by playing in cover bands starting when they were only fourteen years old. They took any gig they could, including high school dances, birthday parties, and shows at the notoriously rough “enlisted men’s clubs.”
“Jacksonville is a Navy town: there’s five naval bases there,” Barnes says. “It’s a big port town, a lot of ships coming in. So all these sailors come in on leave, then they go to these enlisted men’s clubs. So you go in there [the play a show], and you’re underage and you’re watching these sailors fight and all that. But you’re playing all the cover songs, all the hits of the day, and you learn the structures of the songs at a very young age. You don’t realize it, but you’re absorbing all the fundamentals of songwriting, the pattern and the craft of it.
“And then,” he adds wryly, “you get a little cocky and you start thinking, ‘I can write my own songs now.’ Well, that’s when you go starve for the next ten years, so it’s not something I highly recommend.”
Still, there was never any question of quitting. Barnes had wanted to become a professional musician since discovering the Beatles when he was a child, and then pursued that dream with unrelenting determination. “I had to do it, because I had a passion and talent, and I felt like I could grow and learn as I went along,” he says.
Three years after forming 38 Special, the band released a self-titled debut album in 1977, then followed that with Special Delivery in 1978. At this time, Donnie Van Zant was the lead vocalist, and his earthy, bluesy voice was well-suited to the Southern rock that the band was playing.
Unfortunately, Barnes says, “Those two albums went straight over the cliff, so we knew we needed to change.” The problem was, they weren’t sure what direction they should take instead. So they sought advice from Ronnie Van Zant, Donnie’s older brother, who was the lead singer for the successful Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. (He later was tragically killed in a 1977 plane crash that also claimed the lives of other Lynyrd Skynyrd band members and crew.)
“He was a big mentor for the band,” Barnes says of Ronnie Van Zant. “He came in and listened to us rehearse. He said, ‘You know what? Stop trying to be a clone of everything that’s happened before you. Try to find your influences, and what makes your heart sing. And put your life into it — things that happened to you — and make it truth in your songs.’ So we took that great advice.”
They realized that they should be creating songs that were more melody-forward and anthemic. “We called it muscle and melody,” Barnes says. “I was always an attentive student of good songwriting, and good hooks and choruses that lift up out of the song. We always were big fans of arena rock — Boston and Foreigner and Bad Company and all those guys — so we wanted to be into that thing.”
VIDEO: 38 Special “All I Haven’t Said”
At this point, Donnie Van Zant suggested that Barnes take over lead vocals, as his voice seemed more suited to this new style. “The first song I sang, it opened the door a little bit at radio,” Barnes says. (That song was “Rockin’ Into the Night.”) It was clear they were finally on the right track.
Barnes says that Van Zant wasn’t resentful that someone else had proven more successful as the voice for 38 Special: “He was very supportive. It’s one of those things: it doesn’t matter who carries the ball as long as you win as a team. So we were always a team.”
Unfortunately, a myriad of health woes forced Van Zant to quit his role within the band in 2013. “That was pretty sad, but he’s still my partner; he still owns the trademark along with me,” Barnes says.
This has left Barnes as the only remaining original member of 38 Special, and he takes his role as the leader very seriously, making sure that the band works as hard as ever. He says they have continuously averaged more than one hundred shows each year.
“Playing live, that’s always been our forte,” Barnes says. “We do that better than studio work. You see instant reactions of people out there. They’re high fiving each other, and they’re singing along. Sometimes you see a few tears in their eyes. It makes you want to play it with the same amount of passion and conviction as the first time, because you want to be 100% for these people because it’s really affecting them.
“It’s a great job to bring that kind of joy to people, and that’s what we always wanted to do as young boys with the dream — and we’re living the dream today!”
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