‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ is the title track to Alice Cooper's eighth studio album. The song is written by Cooper, Dick Wagner and Bob Ezrin. It peaked at 45 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song itself mixes elements from disco, jazz, hard rock, and keeps a "heavy-yet-funky beat". Cooper would later perform the song on The Muppet Show. The tune was placed tenth on a list AOL Radio made of the "10 Best Halloween Songs" Welcome to My Nightmare is the debut solo studio album and eighth overall studio album by American rock musician Alice Cooper, released on February 28, 1975. Record World said that the single release that "Alice sounds downright ghoulish on this re-mixed and edited LP track.
The Alice Cooper band had broken-up by spring of 1974, with Cooper beginning work on his first solo project. Cooper intended the music to be more theatrical than the previous glam rock focused records. Alice Cooper's manager, Shep Gordon had a clause in his contract, that allowed the members of Alice Cooper to do a soundtrack album for a different label, other than Warner Brothers. As a result, Shep Gordon and Alice Cooper went to Atlantic Records, a sister label to Warner Brothers, to begin work on the album. Cooper hired Bob Ezrin, who had produced four previous Cooper records, to collaborate with him.
This was the centerpiece to Cooper's 1975 tour, which opened with this song and set the stage for the macabre scenes that followed. Cooper approached the song as a production number, and that's how he performed it. For the tour, the musicians were hidden in the back of the stage while Alice performed with various dancers and props. He would emerge in a haze of smoke, singing this song on a bed; the rest of the show was based on the idea that we were seeing his nightmares brought to life. In 1975, Cooper turned the stage show built around this song into a concert movie called Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare, and a TV movie called The Nightmare. The famous horror movie actor Vincent Price played "The Spirit of the Nightmare," narrating the show. The movie was a precursor to long-form music videos, as it was a theatrical production set to music.
Any meaning in the song is up to the listener, as Alice explained, "I project images to the audience and they make up their own story to fit it. I have no message at all. I never did." The cover artwork was created by Drew Struzan for Pacific Eye & Ear. Rolling Stone would later rank it ninetieth on the list of the "Top 100 Album Covers of All Time".
Label – Atlantic Records
Songwriters – Alice Cooper, Dick Wagner, Bob Ezrin
Producer – Bob Ezrin
SONG LYRICS
Welcome to my nightmareI think you're gonna like it
I think you're gonna feel you belong
A nocturnal vacation
Unnecessary sedation
You want to feel at home cause you belong
Welcome to my nightmare, whoa-whoa-oh
Welcome to my breakdown
I hope I didn't scare you
That's just the way we are when we come down
We sweat and laugh and scream here
Cause life is just a dream here
You know inside you feel right at home here
Welcome to my breakdown, whoa-whoa-oh
You're welcome to my nightmare, yeah-yeah-ah
Welcome to my nightmare
I think you're gonna like it
I think you're gonna feel you belong
We sweat and laugh and scream here
Cause life is just a dream here
You know inside you feel right at home here
Welcome to my nightmare, ooh-ooh-ooh
Welcome to my breakdown
Yeah