Kenny Loggins is Loving ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Return to the “Danger Zone”

Kenny Loggins said he never got a call about his hit song Danger Zone being used in the new Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, which soared into theaters Thursday. However, he did ask Tom Cruise about it about four years ago, backstage, when Loggins and Cruise happened to be guests on the same night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

“I went up to him and said, “So, I hear you’re going to do the new Top Gun,” Loggins told The Hollywood Reporter. “Tell me, is “Danger Zone in or out?” And he said, ‘It would not be Top Gun without ‘Danger Zone.””

“I thought maybe he was trying to be nice, but he meant it, and I was very pleased,” Loggins said.

Loggins is thrilled to have his song in Top Gun‘s return, and he thinks the new version of the film raises the bar even higher.

“Well, I thought this was better,” he says of Top Gun: Maverick. “I like the first one a lot, but this one has an energy to it that reminds me of Indiana Jones or Star Wars. It’s really well written, a lot of character development for the new characters and a lot of Saturday matinee cliffhanging that really works for this film.”

Loggins also told the back-story on how he came to record the song for the movie – he said he wasn’t originally among the top choices to record the song.

“Going in and singing it, I thought it was a real long shot, considering I hadn’t really done much like that up to that point in my career,” he said. “Footloose is probably the closest I’d come, maybe I’m Alright [from Caddyshack]. But when I went in there to record Danger Zone, I was thinking of Tina Turner and that aggressive growling that she did. So, that’s what my performance was influenced by, Tina’s style.”

“It was a style that I hadn’t allowed myself to sing,” he continued. “The rock of Danger Zone is really fun for me now because the audiences are much more responsive than they were back in the day. Danger Zone went out of fashion for a long period of time. It was really big for a year or two after the movie, and then sort of moved out. Shows like [FX’s] Archer made Danger Zone fun again.”