PRIDE OF LIONS Trivia — 14 Entries
14 sourced facts about PRIDE OF LIONS.
Trivia
Every one of the eight Pride of Lions albums carries at least one song on its Japanese edition that the import does not. The 2003 debut (KICP-963) is the outlier with three — "Surrender to the Night", "Stand by You" and "So Deadly", taking it to fifteen tracks and one hour fifteen minutes — while the other seven add exactly one apiece. Six of those seven are acoustic versions of a song already on the record. The exceptions are "Reckless Love" on The Destiny Stone and "I Am My Father" on The Roaring of Dreams, which are separate songs found nowhere else.
The band traces back to a tip from Jim Peterik's niece Kelly. She had met Toby Hitchcock at an audition and told her uncle he needed to hear this singer. Peterik brought him into his own studio, and he has said that in that one voice he could hear traces of several singers he had grown up admiring — Dennis DeYoung, Tommy Shaw, Jimi Jamison. The two of them went straight on to cut a demo of "Love Is On The Rocks".
The band's Japanese releases changed hands part-way through. King Records' Nexus imprint handled the first four, from the 2003 debut through Immortal in 2012 (KICP-1639); from Fearless in 2017 (MICP-11331) onwards the Japanese editions have come from Marquee / Avalon, who have issued every one since, up to Unbridled in 2026 (MICP-12035).
The largest audience this band has played to was at the Belgian open-air festival Lokerse Feesten in the summer of 2005. Jim Peterik's official site puts the crowd that night at 20,000. The show was released the following year as the live album Live in Belgium, on CD and on DVD.
"Sound of Home", the fourth track on the debut album, did not get an official music video until 1 June 2020 — seventeen years after the song came out. It was posted on the Frontiers channel, and although it belongs to the oldest album in this catalogue, it is one of the more recent of the fourteen official films registered here. The gap says something about how firmly the song stayed in the band's repertoire.
Hitchcock tells the story of how he and Kelly met rather differently. By his account they first ran into each other at an audition fourteen or fifteen years earlier and stayed friends afterwards. Kelly later turned up to audition for the Chicago event band Hitchcock was running, got the job, and at a rehearsal asked him to sing a duet on a record of her own — and, while she was at it, said she wanted him to meet her uncle. The uncle was Jim Peterik.
Serafino Perugino, who runs Frontiers Records, initially proposed that Peterik's new project be fronted by a name singer. Peterik turned the idea down and held out for Toby Hitchcock, who at that point was completely unknown. Perugino flew from Italy to Nashville to hear the voice for himself and was won over on the spot. That is how the Pride of Lions deal came about.
The final call on what goes on a Pride of Lions album is not the writer's but the label's. Peterik has described handing in around twenty songs per record and Serafino Perugino picking roughly eleven of them — and has added that Perugino is usually right, because he knows his own market. It is part of why these records have sat steadily at eleven or twelve tracks for more than twenty years.
Peterik lives in Illinois and Hitchcock in Evansville, Indiana, and this band is not made with everybody in one room. Hitchcock cuts most of his vocals in his own studio and the record is assembled from files going back and forth. Making Unbridled in 2026 worked the same way: Peterik described roughly three months of sending files to and from Evansville.
"Turnaround", the seven-minute closer of the third album The Roaring of Dreams, brings in Tori Hitchcock, Toby Hitchcock's sister. It was the first time she had appeared on a Pride of Lions record.
The two horses rearing at each other against the lightning on the sleeve of Unbridled (2026) were painted by Mark Alano. "Unbridled" means exactly what the picture shows — a horse with the bridle off — so title and artwork are one idea.
The title track that opens Unbridled begins with an intro from guitarist Mike Aquino. In January 2026, with the record still unfinished, Peterik described that intro as built in the spirit of Van Halen's "Eruption" — a deliberate way to start the album at a run.
Larry Millas, who mixed Unbridled, co-founded The Ides of March with Peterik back in 1964 and engineers the two recording studios Peterik's World Stage operates. The two have known each other since childhood. Millas also writes with this band: he is credited alongside Peterik on "Carry Me Back" and "Unfinished Heart" from Lion Heart in 2020.
Pride of Lions get on stage very seldom. Their most recent concert was on 25 April 2025, the opening day of the seventh Frontiers Rock Festival, their own label's event, at the Live Club in Trezzo sull'Adda, Italy. Twenty-one bands played across the three days; on that first night the band went on at 20:20, following Fans of the Dark, Art Nation, Shakra, Bonfire and Honeymoon Suite, with Asia closing the night at 22:00.