Journey Guitarist: My Romance With 'Real Housewife' Is a 'Fairy Tale'

Michaele Salahi has run off with Journey guitarist, Neal Schon.

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Journey guitarist Neal Schon has opened up to the Daily Beast about his romance with Real Housewives of D.C. star Michaele Salahi. The couple made headlines last week when it was revealed that she had left her husband to run off with the rocker, whom she had dated prior to getting married to Tareq Salahi.

"It's like a fairy tale. It is, it really is,” Schon told the Daily Beast. "I'm very happy, very happy after waiting for her for 15 years. Now I want to get beyond all this media hype that Tareq has put out there. It's really quite embarrassing."

According to Salahi, she had been texting with Schon for some time using a secret device given to her by a friend in order to evade the controlling influence of her husband, who she says attempting to limit her access to the outside world. "Neal was like, 'Are we going to do this forever?' And I said, 'No, we're not,'" Salahi told the Daily Beast. "I began to see he really loved me. I had to begin to feel it completely in my soul."

Photos: Random Notes

Shortly afterward, Schon sent the Salahis backstage passes to his band's show in Bristow, Virginia over Labor Day weekend. While backstage, Schon says that Michaele removed her wedding ring in front of her husband and entered his dressing room. "I'm sitting down. I have tennis shoes on and she's, like, nine feet tall over me," he recalled. "She looks down at me like she's standing on stilts and says, 'I love you. And, that's never gonna change. And when that happened I said, 'Get over here! This has taken 15 years!'"

Though the couple are happy together at the moment, both are still entangled with other partners. Schon reportedly married former Playboy centerfold Ava Fabian in a "humanistic union" in Paris two months ago.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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