Credit: Far Out / Apple Music
Mon 19 October 2026 0:45, UK
The reason Kiss chose to start wearing make-up (if you want to believe that it wasn’t just for marketing reasons) was creative freedom.
In an interview, Gene Simmons once said that Kiss started wearing make-up so that they couldn’t be mistaken for any other band. That strong sense of identity (comparable, in his mind, to The Beatles) meant that Kiss could write whatever style of music they wanted. That works in theory, but those of you who are familiar with Kiss’s discography will be the first to point out that there isn’t a huge amount of variation there.
“We also took pride in having the same freedom The Beatles had,” said Simmons. “Their philosophy was, ‘No matter what kind of music we do, it’s still The Beatles’. That’s what was amazing about them… The Beatles were not trapped in that way. They could do music hall, psychedelia – anything – and they did. Yet somehow it always sounded like The Beatles.”
Sure, you can look to albums like Dynasty where there’s a bit of a disco influence, but for the most part, you’re getting floor-filling stadium rock. Even when the band members veered off and released separate solo albums, Paul Stanley still felt somewhat trapped by the image of Kiss. Every member had to release their albums on the same day to make it look like they were still unified, despite creative directions rarely overlapping.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “The idea was to present group unity, which is kind of interesting, because the solo albums came out of the band being on the verge of splitting up. In the long run, it was putting a Band-Aid on a serious wound.”
When Stanley finally did get to make a solo album that was completely separate from Kiss, you really got a glimpse at just how much he wanted to explore different styles of music beyond the realms of Kiss’s dominating stadium sound. As recently as 2015, he decided to release an album with a newly put-together band called Paul Stanley’s Soul Station. The record was called Now and Then, and as you may have guessed, it consisted predominantly of soul music.
This took a lot of people by surprise, as the music that Stanley was so connected with was heavily rooted in rock; however, when he was talking about the record, he said that it was music he’d wanted to make for years. He was inspired a great deal by different soul artists, and said that they influenced his singing so much that he wanted to pay homage to the artists. Four singers in particular that he highlighted, whom he adored so much that he opted to perform their songs, were Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke and Otis Redding.
Further reading: From The Vault
“The first music I heard was classical music, then Italian opera, then bluegrass and R&B, and the music that preceded Motown and Philly Soul,” he said.
Adding, “I love Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and as a kid I saw Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. So, all this music is really part of the foundation of what I do and where I wound up, so, for me it’s not strange at all.”
He concluded, “But I can understand somebody who has only been exposed to the majority of what I do in public. I‘ve been singing these songs since they came out. I’ve been singing Smokey Robinson since Smokey was with the Miracles. It’s part of my wheelhouse, it’s my passion, it’s not a lark, and it’s not a vanity project, it’s a passion project.”
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