A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
Over 50 years they’ve cruised through heavenly highs and weathered hellish lows. Now, with their latest album, Styx continue to enjoy their latest creative and popular high.
Words: Jerry Ewing
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“ We showed up yesterday and we haven’t played any of these songs all together in the same room at the same time,” Tommy Shaw tells us. “So yesterday we worked up one in the dressing room. Everybody knew their parts and was ready to play it, and it sounds great. Weird, but it’s so nice to be able to play these songs and listen to each other for the first time in the last two years [the first time they’d played them together since latest album Crash Of The Crown was made].”
Understandably, the Styx guitarist and singer is sounding ebullient. As the world gets to grips with the ongoing effects of the covid pandemic, the American rock veterans are back to doing what they do best: making great music and playing it live. “We are ready to hit the ground running,” says an equally upbeat and enthusiastic Lawrence Gowan (keyboards/vocals).
Shaw and Gowan are talking to Classic Rock from a warm and muggy Florida where the band kicked off their US tour at the St. Augustine Amphitheater on June 16. “I got up this morning, showered, dressed, started walking down to this coffee shop, and I had to turn back because I was soaked. It’s so hot and humid,” Shaw laughs.
“Styx were the first [band] outside of the UK to embrace that notion of progressive rock and be successful.”
Lawrence Gowan
Another reason for their shared good mood is Crash Of The Crown, Styx’s seventeenth studio album, which has just been released. As you would expect of a band with Styx’s pedigree, it’s brimming with a vibrancy that belies a band knocking on the door of their 50th anniversary. It’s 15 songs of supreme quality, five of which – opener The Fight Of Our Lives, Reveries, Sound The Alarm, the title track and the atmospheric Lost At Sea – have made the band’s new live set, which is already festooned with such classics as The Grand Illusion, Rockin’ The Paradise, Miss. America, Crystal Ball, Come Sail Away and even the oft-mocked Mr. Roboto. The album rocks hard, and benefits from Shaw’s ear for a potent melody, while longtime fans will be enthused by a distinct progressive sound, which comes from Gowan’s epic keyboard flourishes. It is also something of a concept album, in that the songs flow through an amalgamation of historical events that occurred on such notable dates in history as 1066, 1455, 1775, 1861, 1941, and even 2001, without citing any by name.