Styx's Lawrence Gowan on upholding band's legacy while moving forward with new music

Plenty of classic rock bands seem content to rest on their laurels, coasting by on past hits and rarely, if ever, releasing new music.

That doesn’t appear to be the case for Styx. The classic rockers — known for 1970s hits like “Lady,” “Come Sail Away” and, of course, “Renegade” — just released their third album in eight years, “Circling from Above” on July 18.

“I think that what other bands do is perfectly understandable to me for a multitude of reasons if they’re of this vintage,” singer/keyboardist Lawrence Gowan said. “For us, part of the lifeblood of a band, I think, is endlessly coming up with new things to challenge yourself with.

“Yes, we’re well aware that we could just play nothing but the hits from the ’70s really and do fine. But part of why we lean into it so much and try to outdo what we did last year is because there’s something new on the horizon.”

Whether it’s with the stage show or new music, Gowan said the band is looking to uphold the band’s legacy.

“I’ve been in (Styx) now 26 years, and I look at it like, we are the culmination of 53 years of this band’s existence,” he said. “So we are the culmination of everyone that’s ever been in the band. All those members past and present are really what’s on that stage every single night as far as what’s being upheld. And that, plus doing a new album, just makes you lean into it. It just feels like we’re still on, no pun intended, we’re still on this mission to kind of spread the gospel of Styx as far and wide as we possibly can.”

Styx will bring the Brotherhood of Rock tour to the Pavilion at Star Lake in Burgettstown on Sunday, when they’ll be joined by REO Speedwagon singer Kevin Cronin and former Eagles lead guitarist Don Felder, as well as Donnie Iris. Styx will be playing “The Grand Illusion” in full, while Cronin will do the entire “Hi Infidelity” album.

In a call from Toronto, Gowan discussed the tour, the new album, his preferred method of listening to music and more:

It looks like you’re on a little break now, but how’s this tour been going so far?

Tremendous. That’s the only way I can describe it. I think this might be — I mean it’s a completely unbiased opinion (laughs) — but this might be our best tour ever as far as the production goes, and just the presentation is really, really kind of perfect.

With this tour, do you feel like a real brotherhood of rock exists, especially with the bands that you’re out on the road with?

Yeah, because we’ve toured with these guys for years now. I mean Don Felder, we even did a residency with him in Las Vegas four or five years ago. And as far as the REO guys go, that goes right back to 2000 when we first toured with them and we actually did a double album, a live album, with them back then. So don’t let the name fool you. They’re going through their own backstage drama, but three of the guys that I always toured with in REO are right there, with Kevin (Cronin) and Dave (Amato) and Bryan (Hitt) and having Matt Bissonette from Elton John’s band on bass and Derek (Hilland) on keys. They’re really very, very strong right now. And they’re playing the “Hi Infidelity” album in its entirety. So you’ve got two of the biggest classic albums being played in their entirety at these shows, and that’s four hours straight of classic rock. So there’s an awful lot for people to sink their teeth into it.

It’s probably a very crowd-pleasing night …

It really is. Quite honestly, this is very much a crowd pleaser. We’re people pleasers. It’s incumbent on bands that have had careers the length that we’ve had. With over half a century of Styx, you do kind of owe it to the audience out there to uphold as much of the legacy as you possibly can. And at the same time, we owe it to ourselves to continue the life of the band. And part of that lifeblood is doing new music. We found in the last eight years, over the course of these last three albums, that the audience now is quite evenly spread from people that are on any given night, it can be as many people under 40 years of age and over 40 — I’m just picking out an arbitrary number. But the ones under 40 weren’t even born when the biggest records of the whole classic rock era came out. And yet they’ve embraced this music with such a fervent, strong, strong grasp on the music and see themselves in it. So they seem to be the most obviously receptive to us doing new things alongside the classics.

You’re playing the “Grand Illusion” in full on this tour, so what stands out about that album to you?

I think that’s the pinnacle Styx album, quite honestly. It’s the most recognized, not just the songs, but even the artwork as it goes with that record. I remember picking it up in a record store here in Toronto in 1977 in the week that it came out and studying the cover and trying to get to know, oh, this is the band that put out “Lorelei” and then “Crystal Ball.” Because they were getting a lot of airplay here in Toronto.

And when “Grand Illusion” came out, suddenly a record store here called Sam the Record Man, it was in high rotation in that store. So I would listen to the entire album and I thought, wow, this is amazing. This is a band, I thought at first they were from the U.K. because they had those progressive rock leanings, which I’d loved. And yet when I found out they were from America in Chicago, I thought, wow, this is the first band I’ve noticed that’s doing prog rock, what to my ear is progressive rock, and being really successful at it. So there’s that.

I think for the fans out there, there’s just such monolithically successful, memorable songs on there with “Come Sail Away” and “Fooling Yourself.” Those are big, big rock anthems and the title track as well. What’s really cool is it’s amazing to see people embrace that record as an album experience. It really wasn’t defined by the singles in that era. It was really defined by the entire work. There’s 40 minutes of music there that’s trying to give you the musical philosophy, if you will, of that band. And that’s what I am most drawn to. That’s why the records were such a fantastic work of art. They were able to grab people’s attention for 40 minutes, which nowadays seems like a week. But it’s great to see that some people still embrace that art form and know what a great life-enhancing thing it is to be able to listen to a record in its entirety and really take the whole thing and get the entire musical vocabulary of the band.

Related

• Q&A: My Mom Is Here vocalist Sam Seiff on band's name, live show and more ahead of Pittsburgh concert
• Jason Aldean, Linkin Park highlight top August concerts in Pittsburgh
• 2025 Pittsburgh area concert calendar

I imagine with the shorter attention spans nowadays, it would be tougher to put out an album like that now.

The great thing that I’ve noticed, and the reason that we’ve made the last three albums that we’ve done, “The Mission” and “Crash of the Crown” and this new one, is we’ve made them with the album in mind. Meaning that we dice them up so there’s side one, side two, there’s only 40 minutes of music there, roughly, so that it sits on a vinyl record because not that everybody buys the vinyl — although it does keep kind of selling out — but that format is really intrinsic to getting that album experience if you want it. Even if you’re listening to it digitally, it doesn’t matter, you’re getting exactly that amount.

It’s almost like a meal, in a way, where there’s a certain exact number of courses. If it goes beyond that, it can get kind of tedious, and less than that doesn’t feel quite satisfying, or it shouldn’t, although we are very aware that the 15-second sound bites (laughs) are the most critical way now of drawing people’s attention. We’re not oblivious to that fact of life, but really what we want is people to embrace the entire album. The other thing I would add to that, and I’m sure this is true in Pittsburgh, is that these vinyl record stores that have had such a great resurgence in the last 15 years let’s say, when I go into them now, I’m seeing not just old folks like myself that are looking for the albums that we grew up on, but I see half the store, again, just like our shows, I kind of take a quick look around, and I see younger people picking up (Jethro Tull’s) “Aqualung” or (Yes’) “Close to the Edge” or (Genesis’) “Selling England by the Pound,” and I think I have to thank the internet for that interest, because people can instantly access, what’s this band about?

Whenever you listen to music, do you listen to vinyl? Do you think it sounds better?

OK, usually the sound you grew up on is (best). I’m sitting in a room right now where I’ve got at home a 1946 jukebox that only plays 78 RPMs. It’s full of ’50s rock, which is before my time. But I somehow feel incredibly nostalgic when I put on some old Elvis (Presley) or Little Richard or something on there, because I’m listening to it on the format that it was intended for. I know that sounds a little bit esoteric, but there is something about that that kind of creates a bit of a time machine. Because I’m listening on this jukebox, it’s an old Wurlitzer that was built in Tonawanda, New York, in 1946, it says on the back. You’re hearing it as it existed in that era.

I know this is gonna sound weird, but one of my favorite things is across the room, I have a small record player with one speaker. I like listening to my albums on that, mainly because if I listen to them in the studio, that’s one thing. I got a great turntable and great speakers downstairs in the home studio. And I’ll listen to the albums down there. But really, I enjoy them just as much on a little record player with one speaker because that’s how I listened to them when I was a teenager. … That sound just evokes that era for me so succinctly. I still enjoy that very, very much. I also enjoy the tactile experience of holding an album while I’m listening to it, going over the lyrics and studying the cover for any secret messages and stuff like that. This is what we had instead of video games back then. It was a deep experience.

If you think about “classic” Styx, what are those trademarks to you and do you think this album fits right in with that?

Well, that’s it. That was our goal, particularly on these last three records over the last eight years. Our goal with this record is to have it sound as authentically from that classic rock era as possible. And so in order to do that, we recorded in Nashville in a studio. It’s got all the clunky old machines, all the analog stuff. And we go through the pains — it’s not pains. It’s not painful at all. It’s actually really fun. If the old clunky machines are in working order, and everyone’s in the room together, it’s amazing how quickly you can push yourself into that frame of mind. And we’ve made these records so that they, sonically anyway, match up to the records from the classic era.

So you should be able to put on, for example, “Pieces of Eight” or “Paradise Theatre” and then put on “Circling from Above” and still feel like, even given the fact of a couple of member changes, the spirit of that band is still intact. It hasn’t gone in some bizarre new direction that doesn’t connect with the past. We really feel that there’s a consistency, there’s a coherence to our continuum of basically what the band was built upon. And to my mind, we all have our different camera angles, but to me that’s a progressive rock band that has very, very strong pop and rock sensibility built into it. So the songs are very accessible, but they’re musically adventurous.

One of the first singles is “Build and Destroy,” and you sing lead on that one. How quickly did that song come together?

That was one of the last two that we wrote for the record. It’s funny, toward the end of putting a record together, it’s quite often something that kind of typifies or sums up in some ways the entire album in a very contained package. That song, “Build and Destroy,” seemed to fit the bill of that and also realizing we were gonna play one new song on this summer tour. Let’s make it something that’s high energy so we don’t lose the attention of the crowd, and something that’ll slot in easily with the classic material. I think we come out of “Lady” into “Build and Destroy” and then go into “The Best of Times.” You’ve gotta keep that pacing up. And also the fact the audience are on their feet. Usually, by the last half of the show, they’re on their feet for the last hour or so, usually. So that’s why “Build and Destroy” kind of fit the bill there.

I listened to “King of Love,” and what’s that noise about 23 seconds in? It sounds like a cat. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s this real weird sound …

(Hums the song)

It sounds like a cat getting its tail run over by a rocking chair or something.

Oh, that’s a guitar. It’s just a guitar wailing. No cats were harmed in any way (laughs) to make that record. The only cats on that record were us in Nashville. Let me think about that. (hums the song) Oh, yeah, there’s a squeal and then it goes (makes guitar noises). Yeah, that’s just a guitar feedback.

OK, just guitar feedback. It sounds like a cat.

(laughs) Well, that cat knows how to get some pretty cool feedback.