The legendary classic rock band Styx has long been a household name, penning some of the most enduring hits of the ’70s and ’80s (“Come Sail Away,” “Babe,” “The Best of Times”), but now more than 50 years into their existence, there’s still no sign of the band becoming a mere nostalgia act. Sure, the lineup may have changed somewhat over the years, but the group’s unique sonic identity and commitment to playing live remains steadfast.
Currently touring behind their excellent 2021 release, Crash of the Crown, Styx—singer/guitarist James “JY” Young, singer/guitarist Tommy Shaw, vocalist/keyboardist Lawrence Gowan, bassist Chuck Panozzo, drummer Todd Sucherman, bassist Ricky Phillips and multi-instrumentalist/producer Will Evankovich—roll into Albany on May 9 to perform at the Palace Theatre, in what promises to be an unforgettable night, celebrating both the band’s considerable legacy and compelling ongoing work. To get the lowdown on this epic forthcoming gig, as well as to garner the longevity secrets of one of the truly stalwart classic rock bands, I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Gowan, over Zoom from his tastefully appointed hotel room.
But first, some backstory: In 1999 Gowan joined Styx after the departure of the great Dennis DeYoung—a tall order, to be sure—but some 25 years later, he is more than ever a vital, indelible partner in the Styx story, often co-writing with Shaw and Evankovich. Seeming elated after a successful show the night before in Savannah, GA, Gowan graciously shared his insight with me on both the latest Styx album, Crash of the Crown, the weight of living up to a legacy, and the inherent magic of a live rock show.
BRENDAN MANLEY: You’re coming shortly to Albany; local fans are excited for the show in May at the Palace Theatre. How’s the tour been so far?
LAWRENCE GOWAN: [Knocks on wood.] It’s been a fantastic year so far; just sold-out show after sold-out show. It’s really amazing. The audience last night—we played in Savannah, GA—was just over the top in their response. We know it’s a really great, epic rock show—I’m as entertained as anyone—but the response has been really quite overwhelming, honestly.
BM: That’s awesome. The last record, 2021’s critically acclaimed Crash of the Crown, has been out for a little while now. Have you been playing a lot of material off that release? Do you still consider this a tour for that album?
LG: Yeah, because the record, first of all, is continuing to do really well. In 2021, about a month after it was released—Billboard has a rock album chart now; everything’s designated into various categories—and it got to No. 1 there. And to see Styx at No. 1 somewhere in 2021, that meant that yeah, we’re gonna push this record as far as we possibly can.
The other great thing—and this began [in 2017] with The Mission—is that for a band with a legacy like Styx, Universal [Music Enterprises] said, “Look, we’re going to promote this record for the next couple of years, or whatever it takes for you guys. You’re out there playing 100 shows a year around the world, eventually it’s going to seep in how strong this album is.” That was with The Mission and they’ve really followed the same guidelines for Crash of the Crown. They basically looked at it like, “This is a long-haul promotion that we’re going to do on this.”
Crash of the Crown is an album. It’s that art form that the band is best known for. All classic rock bands really are best known for the album format; it’s not dependent on a single or anything suddenly shooting up the charts, making it a hit song or a hit album. It’s an album that has to be listened to in its entirety at some point. It’s not mandatory every time, but that is the experience: those roughly 40 minutes, with 20 minutes per side. That’s probably why the vinyl keeps going back into reprint: because once people have really had a chance to absorb the record, they want to have that tactile experience of holding the artwork and going through it, like they do with their older records.
BM: Absolutely. And it really is an excellent record. So many legacy acts fall into a pattern of touring and just playing all the fan favorites, and then going back into limbo again. Styx, meanwhile, seems to still really be pushing, both live and creatively.
LG: There are no rules, but basically for us, we are energized and excited. The lifeblood of a band really comes from whatever the new thing is that you’re attempting to do. We’re also very hungry after the long break between Cyclorama in 2003 and then The Mission in 2017. We had to go through all the upheaval that was going on in the music business—particularly, the recording side, and how the Internet had almost entirely decimated the whole paradigm of how things were done—but when that began to come around again there was interest in us making new music, and Universal had the catalog behind it, because that’s what we have to base everything on.
We’re putting on stage a 50-year history; a band that’s been around for half a century, so we like to go as far back as we possibly can, and celebrate that phenomenal era of classic rock music and those four consecutive triple-platinum albums that Styx had, long before I was a member of the band, but at the same time show—and I’m in my 25th year now with Styx—that we really have elevated so much about our live performance. That’s reflected in the fact that the audiences get bigger. The biggest summer tour Styx ever had was summer 2022. Next year is already looking like it’s going to be another great year as well.
So to give a long musical line and be able to play songs like, for example last night Tommy Shaw did “Sound the Alarm,” from Crash of the Crown, straight into “Crystal Ball,” and those two songs are separated by 45 years, but they segue together beautifully. They’re a great artistic statement over a long arc of a career that ties together where Tommy’s mind is currently, and what people have loved about him for decades.
BM: The new record definitely has a classic Styx vibe to it, from the moment you put it on. It’s remarkable how the band has bridged the gap across decades.
LG: Well thank you very much, Brendan. A lot of those accolades go to Will Evankovich, who came in as the producer on The Mission and co-writer, and helped us continue to play the 100-plus shows that we do every year and yet focus properly on making a new record. His inclusion in the band has been really pivotal to us being able to get the focus of doing new music really together, and tying it as seamlessly as possible to what people loved about the band in the past. That’s intentional, quite honestly. We want people to be able to listen to The Grand Illusion and then listen to Crash of the Crown and not feel there’s this horrible bump in the quality or what the band’s intentions are.
BM: Looking down the list of songwriting credits on the new record, it’s clearly a team effort. How did you feel creatively coming into the album, and what are you the most excited about on a personal level that you brought to the table this time?
LG: Well first of all I’m always happy when there’s a song that I’m not part of the writing on, which they want me to sing. For example, we’ve been opening these shows with a song called “To Those,” and I wasn’t part of the writing on that one, but I think it’s a great song and I love the lyrics. It’s great that I can make a contribution to it, just as the lead singer on the song.
But as for the songs that I was involved in the writing of, the title track, “Crash of the Crown,” I’m really proud of, because it was a three-way co-write between myself, Tommy Shaw and Will, but with the intention—or at least part of my own hope for it, and it eventually came through—that there’d be three lead singers on that track. So JY [James Young] leads it off, then it transitions into Tommy and I handing it back and forth, and then I carry the outro. For a four-minute piece—that’s pretty much the length of a pop song—it’s amazing how many transitions the piece makes and how many little elements of progressive rock are squeezed into that…condensed down into it. It’s almost like this concentrated version of what a progressive rock song can be. And as I said, three lead singers on that song make it fairly unique.
BM: In terms of timing, I’m assuming the roots of the record are probably a lot in the pandemic era, and everything happening in the world at that time? And if so, how did that shape the album?
LG: It’s very odd, because quite honestly we had pretty much finished all the writing on the record in early 2020—the last actual writing session we had was January, and we had demoed everything—but then when March came along and everyone was sent home for recess, at first we kind of didn’t even think about the record. We were mainly focused in the first couple months on the rebooking of the gigs—shows had to be rescheduled, etc.—and so a lot of our focus was on that, and how that was going to play out.
Then around June or so, roughly the third month into the 2020 shutdown, we thought we’d better go listen to where the record is at, and just start thinking about where the focus of it is after this. It was much to our shock, honestly, how those songs related so well to the situation that we and everyone else were going through. We already had “The Fight of Our Lives,” and just immediately the lyrics lent themselves to that. “Hold Back the Darkness,” was a song that was already in there too, and probably the intention of it was something entirely different, but in the lyrics of the songs there seemed to be this idea that, “We’re gonna go through it. We’re going to find us a place of renewal after a cataclysmic event,” that was already baked into the bread, so to speak. It was already in the fabric of the songs that were there. The cataclysmic event was never named and doesn’t have to be, but you could easily personalize the songs and move them toward the situation you were going through now.
LG: The other two songs that came subsequent to that were “To Those” and “Our Wonderful Lives,” and they particularly addressed and put a nice little bow on the overall feeling of the record, that had this sense of renewal, post cataclysmic event. That is exactly what we’re still all feeling quite honestly and I think that’s part of why the record is still resonating so well with people: We’re all still—to quote another song on that album— “coming out the other side.” There are psychological things that we’ve all to varying degrees had to reconcile ourselves with, and still are, whether we’re conscious of it or not. I think that may be part of what we’re seeing in the audiences, with their abandoned and completely elated state at the show. Something even deeper has happened because of that. Crash of the Crown seems to address that.
BM: The live format has really accelerated post pandemic. It seems the shows and the audiences across the board, whatever the genre, whatever the band, have everyone just so excited to see live music again.
LG: Exactly. For me, too…. Last year I’d ask the audience, “I’ll bet everyone remembers the last show they saw before the shutdown, and I’ll bet you all remember the first show like crazy that you came back to after. For how many of you here is this your first show back?” It would usually be something like 75 percent of the audience. You’d hear them all suddenly yell.
I would relate to that, because the last show I saw before the shutdown was Elton John on the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, and the first show back I saw was Genesis, and I felt the same way. In the shutdown year of 2020, I was so glad that I went to that Elton show, because that was my memory of the most recent rock show I’d been to and it was such a great show. Then the feeling of seeing Genesis the first time back, as a fan it hit me on a deeper emotional level than I thought. I realized, “This is what people are feeling when they come to see a Styx show right now. This is the same emotion.” You realize a great rock show is the greatest form of entertainment. It goes beyond entertainment; it’s something that really stays with you and has quite a profound effect, honestly. It does on me, anyway. And I can see that in the audience.
BM: Then you get a lot younger concertgoers who might have been too young to even start going to concerts before the pandemic, and now they’re just going to their first shows.
LG: You’re absolutely right and that’s a great point, Brendan. Over half the audience on any given night at our shows is under 40 years old, so they weren’t even born in the classic rock era. They weren’t even born in that time when these bands that they love—and they love them just as much as we did, growing up with them—they’ve embraced that as part of the soundtrack of their lives, and you can see it. I saw it again last night, and of the people that are under 40, I’d say two-thirds are well under 30. So it’s pretty astounding, just the longevity. It makes me confident to say classic rock is the great musical statement of the last half of the 20th century and the proof is that here we are, some 70 years into it, and you’re still seeing younger people responding to it as if it’s concurrent with their lives. That’s quite remarkable.
BM: That being said, is it harder to sell the average concertgoer on the new material? Are they there just to hear the classics?
LG: It’s hard when a band’s been around for more than five years, I’d say. [Laughs] People have galvanized themselves to it—to an era, or a set of songs that they really have to hear—so that’s why you’re never going to come to a Styx show and not hear “Renegade,” or “Come Sail Away,” or “Fooling Yourself,” or “The Grand Illusion,” or “Too Much Time on My Hands.” They’re in every single show. We want to please the audience, and it pleases us too, because every night we play those songs, it’s not like, “Oh, we’re playing that old song again.” It’s new every day; there’s a new inflection.
“Come Sail Away” is very malleable; you can completely focus it in a different direction every time you do it, as we do. But we have found a pretty successful way of being able with these last two albums to easily segue from newer material into the classic material that people have come to hear. Sometimes when we’re playing something new, it’s amazing how the audience now—rather than leaving the stadium to go get some popcorn or whatever—they’re always very attentive, because a lot of them sound like they might be something from a classic album that they aren’t aware of yet. Maybe it’s something from the one of the first five Styx albums, because they don’t sound intentionally like we’re trying to sound fresh and new. We really are trying to uphold everything sonically, at least from that classic rock AOR instrumentation, and lyrically we have to be somewhat current, in that we’re trying to not be cliché. We’ve found some effective ways of placing new material just so, that it doesn’t disrupt the experience that people are coming to have.
BM: Since you’ve been touring on this record for a while, what are you thinking about in terms of next endeavors? Are you already writing the next record?
LG: We’re always writing the next record. That’s always been ongoing. That’s funny, people said, “Oh, you had this creative drought.” I’d see that sometimes. There’s tons of new music that came up between the between Cyclorama and The Mission; sometimes we put out the odd single. But it really made more sense for the band to keep spreading the Styx gospel by playing live as much as we possibly could and not necessarily focusing on anything new during that period. Now it’s kind of everything. We want the creative stuff to come out of where the band is now, and we want people to be able to easily match that material with the history of the band. That’s subjective; that’s down to the listener and how they perceive it, but for us, we’re feeling like there’s a nice lineage here that connects us with the music of the past and with all the members of Styx from the very beginning.
BM: You said earlier that it’s 25 some-odd years for you with the band. Do you still feel like the new guy? Or has that ship sailed long ago, no pun intended?
LG: I’m not feeling like a new guy. I love when anybody says “new” next to my name now at this point. I love it. They don’t say “new guy” very often anymore; I think I’ve played nearly 3,000 shows, and we’ve done three full-on brand new studio albums, plus The Big Bang Theory covers album (2005)—which predated the TV show [of the same name, but no relation], by the way—plus live DVDs and everything, so no, I don’t fall into necessarily the same category as “new guy.” But it’s fine if they say, “of this era of Styx.” I’m the change that the band felt was necessary to make, with all of the backstage history and drama that was ongoing. It’s helped to extend the life of the band, let’s put it that way.
BM: That’s another intriguing part of the Styx story, to be sure. You see incoming singers who’ve had to fill the sizeable shoes of well-regarded singers before them; Journey being a great example. Styx’s Dennis DeYoung was such a well-loved vocalist, it’s really something to sing his parts, still be doing it 25 years later, and doing it well.
LG: Here’s the thing: No one replaces anyone. There’s no such thing as one human being replacing another, let alone within a band. It’s funny, right from the very beginning, they’ve never wanted me to do anything but just interpret the songs in my way, and give it as honest of a rendition of those classic pieces as I possibly can, but also keeping in mind that we are a culmination. The band as it exists today is so strong, because we are the culmination of the efforts of every member of the band from the very beginning. I’ve said that fairly often, and it’s true. I’m part of the line that has brought the band to this.
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Styx will be performing at The Palace Theatre in Albany on May 9. Tickets can be purchased here.
