FIREHOUSE TRIVIA
Trivia
The credentials Firehouse list on their own site are specific: sixteen gold and platinum records, over seven million sales worldwide, two Billboard Hot 100 top five hits, four in the top twenty-five and seven in the top hundred. Add an American Music Awards win, two ASCAP Songwriter's Awards, and Love Of A Lifetime being voted the number one wedding song. The same page puts their touring career at over thirty-five years and notes that their songs have been used in television, feature films and video games.
Love Of A Lifetime, the song Firehouse are known for, was written before the band existed. CJ Snare told Songfacts that at the time he was working solo in a hotel lounge with a keyboard and a drum machine; one night, after his own set was over, he went back down to the lounge, enjoyed some free beer and put the song together. He had not found any love of a lifetime himself at that point. He simply thought it was a nice ideal, he said, and something interesting to write about.
That song nearly did not make the album at all. CJ Snare told Songfacts that he had written it on a Fender Rhodes and gone as far as registering the copyright with the Library of Congress — and then played it to Jon Bon Jovi, who told him to put the song away because it would ruin his career. He took the advice, wrote something else for the demo instead, and it was that demo that won the band their deal with Sony Music and Epic Records. Which is why he had not mentioned the song even to his own bandmates.
Love Of A Lifetime only surfaced after the album was finished. As Songfacts tells it, the label was not happy with the power ballad the band had recorded — a song called Midnight Fantasy — and floated the idea of bringing in outside writers to help. At which point CJ Snare said he had another one. His bandmates, by his account, had no idea what he was talking about. What came out was exactly what the label had been looking for, and it became the band's biggest hit.
Bill Leverty is credited as a co-writer of Love Of A Lifetime although he had nothing to do with writing it. CJ Snare explained to Songfacts that the two of them had an arrangement resembling the one Lennon and McCartney used in The Beatles: credits and income split equally, whoever actually wrote the song. Of this one, Snare said he remembers a six-figure royalty cheque for a single month — and that Leverty received one the same size. He was careful to say he was not comparing the two of them to Lennon and McCartney.
I Live My Life For You, from 1995, was written by CJ Snare about the woman who was then his wife. He told his interviewer that he woke at five in the morning and wrote it with her in mind. They later split, and Songfacts notes the irony: she turned out not to be his love of a lifetime. By 1995 the charts belonged to R&B, hip-hop and melodic pop, and the hair metal mainstays — Poison, Mötley Crüe — had fallen out of favour along with their ballads. The song still reached No.26 in the US and became the biggest hit from the band's third album. Snare called the result unexpected.
If you only know Firehouse from the radio, CJ Snare told Songfacts, the live band is heavier than you would expect. He pointed to Shake And Tumble, Reach For The Sky and Hold Your Fire as a different picture from the one drawn by Love Of A Lifetime, When I Look Into Your Eyes and I Live My Life For You. His own starting point sits closer to the first list: his first love and his first band were heavy metal, and the singers he named as influences were Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson and Klaus Meine of the Scorpions. That, he said, is where he learned melody and songwriting.
Firehouse won Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock New Artist at the 1992 American Music Awards. Blabbermouth records that they were chosen over Nirvana and Alice In Chains. CJ Snare referred to the award himself in a later interview, citing it while making the point that the band had started out as a hard rock and heavy metal act. The band's own site still lists an American Music Awards win among its credentials.
CJ Snare first became unwell about two and a half years before he died. Bill Leverty recounted in 2025 that during a show in Milwaukee, Snare came over to him and said he had never felt this bad — and then finished the set anyway. On a break he went to the emergency room, where a bowel obstruction was found and removed; two weeks after the surgery he was singing again. The lab results that came with it were very bad news, but he asked that it be kept private. A second, twelve-hour operation followed, and he was back singing six weeks after that, with a scar about ten inches long that nobody would have guessed was there. That, Leverty said, is how tough he was.
The name Nate Peck reached Firehouse through Robby Lochner of Jack Russell's Great White, who told Bill Leverty that with all those dates on the books they might need a substitute, and that he should look this guy up. Leverty did not watch American Idol and had never heard of him — but he found Peck's Instagram full of songs by some of the greatest singers there are, all performed live into a microphone, and all of them nailed. He phoned and asked whether Peck would fill in until CJ came back, expected around July. Peck said yes. He knew exactly one Firehouse song, Love Of A Lifetime, and there were no rehearsals at all: his first gig, at New England Rock Fest, was preceded only by a long soundcheck, and by Leverty's account he was very nervous and still crushed it. Snare watched the video and told Leverty plainly that Peck was his guy.
CJ Snare died at home on the night of 5 April 2024, aged 64. His daughter Heather gave the official cause as cardiac arrest. The band posted a statement on 7 April, opening with the observation that it was a sad day for rock and roll, and saying they had lost their brother — a rock and roll warrior, their lead vocalist, a founding member of Firehouse. He was arguably one of the best vocal talents of a generation, the statement said, and had toured the world with the band without a break for thirty-four years. It closed by borrowing one of his own titles and telling him to reach for the sky. Fans had already been told he was expected back on stage that summer, once he had recovered from surgery.
Eight days after CJ Snare died, the surviving members played a show in his memory at the Niswonger Performing Arts Center in Greeneville, Tennessee — 13 April 2024, with his family's blessing. His partner Katherine Little and his daughter Heather were there, and not in the audience: Heather took lead vocals on Here For You, a song her father had written for her when she was two years old. She sings in the Florida-based covers band Audio Exchange.
Firehouse still dedicate a song to CJ Snare at every show. Bill Leverty explained in 2026 that the song is Home Is Where The Heart Is — one of the first he and Snare wrote together, and one Snare was particularly fond of. They take the view that heaven brought him back home, Leverty said, and so every night they say that the song goes out to him before they play it.
The second single, Midnight Gasoline, grew out of a riff Bill Leverty had been playing at soundchecks for years. As he explained in 2026, a soundcheck runs drums first, then bass, then everyone's vocal mic, and the last thing the sound engineer wants is rhythm guitar — and that riff is what Leverty played when his turn came round. Nate Peck heard it and suggested they do something with it. Leverty recorded it and emailed it over; what came back was the title Midnight Gasoline. He was impressed that a twenty-five-year-old had produced it. The song took shape from there, by email.
Firehouse keep their new songs off the streaming services and sell them from their own website for a dollar each. Bill Leverty explained in 2026 that this lets fans support the band by buying the song. They will put them on streaming one day, he said, but they are in no hurry — and he was blunt about why: once it is on streaming, very little of it comes back to the band, which is simply how the industry works now. They are not trying to get rich, he said. They want to cover the recording costs, the flights and the petrol to get from one place to the next.
Asked in 2026 whether there had been talk of re-recording the Firehouse classics with him singing, Nate Peck said he did not believe so, and that they should stay CJ Snare's. He would have no problem doing it and it is the band's call, but out of respect for Snare he thinks it is safer to leave them where they are. On how he approaches the old songs live, he said he learned them to sound the way they used to be sung, or the way they sound on the record — because that is what everybody remembers, and because it takes a listener back to when and where they first heard it.
The first single from the debut album was not Love Of A Lifetime. Songfacts records that the band led with the up-tempo Don't Treat Me Bad, which reached No.19 on the US chart in June 1991. Love Of A Lifetime followed and went further, hitting No.5 that September and becoming their biggest hit. CJ Snare noted that Don't Treat Me Bad went gold — which in those days, he said, meant they had broken even.
All She Wrote was built backwards from a phrase Snare overheard. He told Songfacts that when someone said "and that was all she wrote" something lit up, and he wrote the story in reverse. The expression normally just means the end of something; he took it literally and made it a farewell letter, found when the man gets home — a man who, the song argues, should have seen it coming. It was the fourth and final single from the debut album.
Don't Treat Me Bad is not about anyone in particular. CJ Snare told Songfacts that he came up with the chord progression sitting at a piano, had the first verse, the bridge and the chorus, and then took it to the band to hammer out the rest — mostly with Bill Leverty. On piano, he said, it sounded nothing like the guitar version that ended up on the record. Some of his songs come from experience and some are pure fiction, he explained; this one is the second kind.
The sleeve of the debut album FireHouse shows a woman in the foreground with a smouldering match while a house burns down behind her. Songfacts reads the image as an extension of the unhinged female character the album's Don't Treat Me Bad was trying to introduce; the video, directed by Mark Rezyka, cuts between concert footage and a girl destroying the singer's belongings. Given that the band's name means a fire station, a burning house on the cover is a fairly deliberate joke.
When I Look Into Your Eyes, from the second album Hold Your Fire, was a deliberate second attempt at the same thing. Songfacts records that when it came time to write for the follow-up, CJ Snare and Bill Leverty set out to compose something like the big hit from the debut. Snare confirmed as much in his interview: they needed another ballad, so the two of them put one together, and it was not about anybody in particular. It worked — the song came close to matching its predecessor.
CJ Snare had a habit in his songwriting that he had not noticed himself. He told Songfacts that he tends to put the hook line first in the chorus, close with the same line, and repeat it once more somewhere outside the chorus — so that nobody walks away asking what that song was again. The person who spotted the pattern was Chris Green, guitarist in Snare's other band Rubicon Cross, who thereafter took to calling him Captain Hook. It was never meant as a formula, Snare said; it is more like the way a painter has particular brushstrokes.
On 26 September 2023, CJ Snare announced on social media that he would be stepping off stage for a while to undergo abdominal surgery. It was doctor's orders; some dates were postponed and rescheduled, and the rest would go ahead with a fill-in singer. He asked fans to go and enjoy Firehouse in the meantime, until he was back. All that was made public at that point was the surgery — the stand-in was not yet named.
Snare's death took the band completely by surprise. Bill Leverty explained in 2025 that the plan had been for him to return in July 2024: come out, sing a song or two, introduce Nate Peck, do a couple together, take a break, come back for an encore — whatever he felt up to. Leverty had spoken to him on the phone the day before he died, and Snare had said he was gaining weight and things were looking up. The next day, connecting through an airport in Texas, Leverty took the call and gathered the band there to tell them. None of them, he said, had been ready for it.
Nate Peck formally joined Firehouse in May 2024. A golden ticket recipient from season 21 of American Idol in 2023, he had already been standing in during the six months or so of CJ Snare's absence, with Snare's full support. The band's first recording with him was the single Mighty Fine Lady, released in May 2025. Firehouse had not put out a studio album since 2011's Full Circle, which itself contained re-recorded versions of older songs; their last collection of new material was Prime Time in 2003.
The player Bill Leverty singles out on Midnight Gasoline is drummer Michael Foster. In 2026 he called it Foster's best drumming performance ever and said he keeps getting better both as a recording artist and as a live player. Foster lives nearby, so he could come back over to change a fill he was not happy with until it was exactly right. If your drummer is happy, Leverty reckons, the song is going to groove. Bassist Allen McKenzie came over to record bass and vocals, and the solo section was built as the moment where the song's story — a couple driving across the country — turns briefly unsettling.
Nate Peck set out his own view in 2026 on releasing singles rather than albums: putting one big thing in front of people risks losing them three songs in, whereas a run of singles keeps them wanting more. Releasing singles until you have enough for a full album is, he thinks, the smart move. Bill Leverty described the same plan around that time in arithmetic: Midnight Gasoline was number two, they were choosing what to work on for number three, and after that they had seven to go before they had a CD.
Two years after CJ Snare's death, asked whether he hears longtime fans say no CJ, no Firehouse, Bill Leverty allowed that he does — a little. But anyone who gives Nate Peck a fair listen, he said, comes away thinking that he serves the songs well and does all of them great justice, and that he simply has the natural tone people expect. Very few say it, he added, once they have actually had a chance to hear Peck.
Firehouse's classic line-up was CJ Snare on vocals, Bill Leverty on guitar, Michael Foster on drums and Perry Richardson on bass. As Blabbermouth records, Richardson left in 2000 and Allen McKenzie took over the bass in 2003. Blabbermouth described the band in 2023 as having been formed nearly four decades earlier.