By Jim Barber
Legendary American rock band Styx has been touring the highways and byways of the world, releasing classic song, after classic song for 53 years. Many of those songs, such as ‘Blue Collar Man,’ ‘Come Sail Away,’ ‘Renegade,’ ‘Babe,’ and ‘The Best of Times,’ are the soundtrack to the lives of three generations of fans, and continue to be staples on both terrestrial and satellite radio.
For 26 of those 53 years, so pretty darn close to half the band’s entire existence, lead vocals and keyboards, as well as compelling songwriting, has been provided by Canada’s own Lawrence Gowan. A solo star in his own right throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he joined Styx in 1999, and even though he reignited his solo career in Canada 15 years ago – to great acclaim and continuing success – he continues to be a popular and stalwart member of Styx, adding his unique energy, keyboard mastery and vocal prowess to the group’s enduring legacy.
Unlike many of their contemporaries, Styx has not shied away from releasing new studio material. They could simply re-release compilation albums, and have produced a number of well received live albums over the past quarter century, but the craft of songwriting and the desire to keep creating runs strong in the veins of the band members, which still includes founding members James J.Y. Young and bassist Chuck Panozzo, alongside longtime vocalist/guitarist Tommy Shaw, who originally joined the band in 1975. Drummer Todd Sucherman replaced the late John Panozzo behind the kit in 1996, and his bestest Canuck buddy Gowan came along three years later after the departure of band co-founder Dennis DeYoung.
Circling from Above, released in July, is the band’s 18th album, and it’s fifth since Gowan joined the band. It followed on the heels of the two previous records, both of which were critically acclaimed and generated a great deal of love from both new and old fans, 2017’s The Mission and Crash of the Crown, which was a wonderful COVID pandemic antidote, coming out in 2021.
Styx just wrapped up its summer tour throughout North America, which saw the band performing in front of 10,000 to 20,000 or more fans per night. A highlight of the show saw a performance of the classic 1977 album, The Grand Illusion in its entirety. But there was also a chance for fans to hear the new single ‘Build and Destroy,’ which has quickly become a fan favourite.
The audience makeup for a Styx show is surprisingly diverse in terms of ages, with healthy heapings of the old guard, but also a remarkable number of new fans, many if not a majority of whom have discovered the band on their own terms, and who have taken on a sense of ownership of the current version of Styx, while respecting what has come before.
“For the first 40 minutes of the show, it’s The Grand Illusion. And then we start doing a series of hits and we put in ‘Build and Destroy,’ the only new song that cracks the set at this point. I sing three in a row at that point in the set, so we do ‘Lady,’ then ‘Build and Destroy’ and it leads into ‘The Best of Times.’ So it’s got a sweet spot, and most nights we pop out our in-ear monitors to hear what the response is. And I would say it’s really strong, in terms of the reactions we’ve got over the years to new songs we play. It’s been building since The Mission the response to something new in 2021 got even stronger. Reaction to The Mission was so strong that we played that album in its entirety at several special shows that we did in Las Vegas, Boston, Washington and New York. I think that album began to really connect with the half of the audience – half being sort of an arbitrary number – that are under 40 years of age and weren’t even born when the biggest records of the classic rock era came out,” Gowan said over Zoom from his hotel room in Milwaukee.
“They seem to be the ones that are more hungry for something that is concurrent with their lives. They’ve fallen in love with classic rock and they love that sound, but they seem to be like, ‘do you have any more of that?’ And then you have the faithful who’ve been there right from the beginning, some of them for over 50 years. They really want, for the most part, at least initially, to recapture the music of their youth and have that, which is the bulk of the show anyway – 95 per cent of the show, if not more. So we’re connecting with both audiences. When we play something new, even last night in Chicago, I looked out at the audience halfway through ‘Build and Destroy’ as I’m singing it and I can see people singing along already, which is amazing. And they’re the younger fans. I think they’re interested in the lineage of the band, those who were there before, because they’re all vitally important pieces to the sum of what is on stage today.”
When it comes to the 21st century version of Styx, operating within the current music industry environment, there’s a lot more freedom, a lot more independence and a lot less outside pressure to produce music. There is always a commercial consideration, in that when you do release an album, you’d like it to sell, but just as important is that it’s selling because it’s good and because it’s connecting with audiences on a deeper level.
“I suppose if there’s any luxury or advantage to being a band that’s been around for decades, and in the case of Styx, it’s now 53 years at this point, and I’ve been in it for 26 of those years, we don’t have those pressures. We’ve actually said to each other with the last three albums, if we don’t love it, we’re not putting it out. We don’t have to just for the sake of putting something out. Other bands of our era, they’ve stopped putting out new music. Or when they do, they might not lean into it as hard as we do. We just have to lean into it as hard as we can because we’re driven that way. I think that’s a distinction we’re pretty happy with. But you’re right, and you’re kind of making me laugh to myself, because I fought all those battles as a solo artist,” Gowan said, adding that it’s also why Styx chose to write, record and release full albums, including physical versions. The albums, including Circling from Above, were conceived not as a disparate collection of songs, but as a cohesive unit with a common vibe, common thematic connective tissue and elements of a coherent story interwoven throughout the 40 or so minutes of music.
“I’m just as guilty of this thing as anyone else. I’m not honouring myself in the slightest way, but let’s just say on subjects that I know a little bit about, the art form of the album is one of them. I’m going to lean a little bit heavier now on younger people for this very reason; to embrace it because it’s a musical experience that takes you about 40 minutes to get through and you may be on the fence deciding whether or not you really love this artist or this band or whoever it is. Is it just a couple of good songs? An album gives you a 40-minute window where if you go from beginning to end, don’t playlist it, don’t mix it with other artists and everything, then you begin to kind of drink in its musical vocabulary, it’s lyrical philosophies, if you want to call them that.
“You’re getting the entire trajectory of what this band is trying to accomplish or trying to pull you into their world. And it causes the mind to expand and begin to kind of create a theatre of the mind. That’s what I’ve always found about the album experience; that it’s very enriching. And I say that because if that weren’t the case, then would I be going out on stage 40 years later playing [his iconic solo album] Strange Animal, because it’s the 40th anniversary of that album for me. Playing the entire record and watching the audience’s reaction to it and how they know the record from beginning to end – they’ve all got a personalized experience of it too. And with Styx, it’s the same thing with Grand Illusion, which we’ve been playing start to finish on this tour. Everyone has a personalized experience of this musical piece that has taken them places in their mind and made a musical connection that has united them. And to go even further that that, I’d say that in a public sense, to see thousands of people night after night united by that individual experience that they’ve now culled together into this massive audience, and to see the enjoyment and the life enrichment that they feel from that musical experience is really amazing. And I’m in no way disparaging the fact that you get your music differently now and it can be in small little bites. But to really embrace an album is a deeper musical experience. That’s really what it is, and that’s why I think it’s valid for us to try to do those things.”
And getting back to the notion of having the freedom to create what they want, when they want, how they want, Gowan said the process leading to the last three albums, including Circling from Above was as natural as it was creatively fulfilling.
“Honestly, it really is organic. First of all, you kind of take stock of how successful the previous record was and you see how people reacted to it and whether there’s a desire from them for more. But it’s really just that new ideas begin to flourish and get fleshed out in the dressing room. Suddenly you’ve got a riff or something else, some other idea and everyone starts jumping in on it. This is what I love about the band experience as opposed to being a solo artist. I love both equally, but they’re a little bit different. One is a very personal musical adventure that you’re on. And the other is this shared kind of combined clash of musical minds as to what we can do, what we can pull together. And I have to say that Universal Music letting us put out these three most recent albums have been very indulgent in that,” he said.
“I think they see the validity in a band like us, that is still striving to make records that are equal to or worthy of the legacy of a band that’s been around for over half a century and come up with stuff that we really feel is quality, not just putting something out for the hell of it, but really being able to kind of analyze it, look each other in the eye and say, ‘I’m perfectly happy putting this out, whatever the outcome may be. This is a good representation of where the band is today.’ And you do defer, more or less, to the guys that have been in the band the longest as the arbiters of whether or not something is worthy. I think they’ve definitely earned that.
“And sometimes it takes a bit more convincing. It’s hard to imagine what the Styx sound is today. You have a mental picture that’s based on the past, but then you have to open your mind up to how many flavours, how many colours from the past can we integrate into where the band is today, with the personalities and the talents that exist now. Once they’ve reached a suitable or acceptable balance of those ingredients, then the song could very well be worthy.”
Gowan then talked about how the concept of Circling from Above came about, with its theme of the existential tug of war between the natural world and the technological world, and how humanity needs to bring more balance to that relentless and ever-evolving conflict.
“This goes back to what we were talking about with the idea of the album experience. First of all, I love when people assign a record to be conceptual because that means to me that the cohesion between those songs is strong enough that you begin to project what is the concept here? For this album there’s actually no overriding concept, but there’s a cohesion in the collection of songs where one hands off to the next in a really palpable way that makes your mind, because of the way the mind works, connect those dots, much like the cover of Circling from Above with all the individual birds connecting into one giant bird,” he explained.
“I’ll go right back to the 1960s and, of course, I saw Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as this conceptual record. But if you listen to interviews from the Beatles individually they all say, especially Paul, that there was no concept there. These were just the songs that they had at the time, and they went together extremely well. You can’t help to put sort of a cinematic glaze over the entire thing. I would say that with Circling from Above, if there’s a concept and overriding theme, it’s the struggle that we have today of trying to balance the wonderful inventions of technology and the extremely frightening inventions of technology – the two of them – within our human condition, with our humanity, with our flesh and blood experience. And we’re grappling with that, let’s face it.
“There are all kinds of implications about how this has enhanced or been to the detriment of the human experience. There does seem to be a lot of hinting at that throughout the lyrics. It’s just where we are as people. ‘Build and Destroy’ has some of that, where only you can decide. So, they do connect in a way that I think is quite pleasing. That song is kind of an anchor to the album and that’s part of why that’s the song that we included as the first song that came out with the record. It wasn’t even meant to be a single, but it resonated with people and it cracked the set list. And that’s a pretty tough set list to crack. But that song seemed to encompass, or at least open the door to what the album kind of points to.”
A significant aspect of the thematic material infusing the songs on Circling from Above is humanity’s love/hate relationship with technology and also how humanity loves to believe that through it’s ‘clever’ use of technology, be it the plough, the steam engine, the rocket ship or Artificial Intelligence, it can tame, manipulate and control it’s environment.
As discussed already, lead-off single ‘Build to Destroy’ can said to be the emblematic song on the album, with a video that is both arresting and disturbing (for some) in how AI has been able to recreate each band member of Styx. In a sense, Gowan, et al, are ‘replaced’ by their artificially created avatars.
“I was a bit freaked out to see myself. But I’ll tell you why I wasn’t really all that freaked out. We decided to go with the newest technology of all. I worked with a fellow in Toronto named Jay Ziebarth on a couple of lyric videos in the past. He worked with us on Crash of the Crown. I met him through my son Dylan who’s a professional musician and he’s into the metal. Well, he’s very metal. And I’ve met a lot of friends through him. A lot of his friends have become my friends. I met Jay because he was a metal guy. He and his brother Trevor had a band where they played a lot of 1980s music. And the band was called Moonlight Desires [named after one of Gowan’s biggest hit singles]. But Dylan also showed me some of the video stuff he was doing, and this was quite a few years ago. I thought these two brothers were pretty talented. When Styx decided ‘Build and Destroy’ was going to be the single, Will Evankovich, our producer and bandmate and co-writer asked if my friend Jay played around with any AI stuff. I asked him and he showed me what he’d been playing around with about nine months previous. And I know there’s all kinds of implications here both positive and negative with AI, let’s face it. We’re going to make amazing medical discoveries and things that are going to potentially save – or potentially destroy everything. It’s like we’re splitting the atom all over again,” he said.
“But I also thought that it fits with the idea of the song and that we should utilize it and see what comes out of it. So Jay took all our photos, did some sketches himself because he’s an artist and began the process of punching things into AI. For every single shot that you see in the video, there’s about six or seven things that it would spit back that were so ludicrous that we were like, ‘oh this is useless.’ But there would always be one little nugget that worked, and this is what intrigued me. And it was always the nugget where the human side began to direct the AI and not the other way around. For example, we said, let’s talk about builders. And sure enough the concept of bees came – the bees and the hive and what the collective can put together. That started to emerge. So you’re starting to see, oh there’s a bit of a story here. And in the video, there’s this split within the band. I’m the scientifically minded, technologically minded guy and Tommy Shaw is trying to build this beehive to the sky. And we are both undercut because the birds, this big flock of birds, they have another idea entirely. They don’t like either plan, and they take over. And eventually, at the conclusion of the video, which is a lot like how we feel about AI, if you can’t beat them, you can join them, because we all become birds, even though that was not our original intention. I don’t know if that’s what everybody took from that video, but I know we got a lot of comments. Some were extremely accepting of the concept, and some said there are things that AI is doing that are just horrible. And I agree with both of them, but ultimately, it’s a good piece of entertainment. I’ve said in other interviews that it’s sort of the tug of war between nature and man’s intentions. But as we all know, or should know, it’s a foregone conclusion that nature ultimately wins. It’s important to always remember that, and yet we as a species are driven to try and control as much of the narrative of what goes on in the universe as we possibly can. I think that’s both very noble, and very foolhardy. But that’s who we are. And as I said, and I hate to be a spoiler, ultimately nature wins.”
One of the most interesting developments both for Gowan personally and for Styx, is that his younger brother Terry joined the band early in 2024, replacing longtime bassist Ricky Phillips. It not only upped the Canadian content by a significant level, but doubled the number of Gowans onstage playing classic Styx songs to thousands and thousands of fans every night. One of the factors that led to the choosing of Terry Gowan to join the band as a member was the fact that he had been playing alongside his brother Lawrence in his solo band for many years and that they also had similar tastes in music.
“When I joined Styx in 1999 I made a conscious decision that I was not going to do any solo stuff while I’m focusing on the band. I can’t split myself like that. And for the first 11 years I didn’t. In 2010 it was the 25th anniversary of the Strange Animal album, which is the ground zero album for me, the one that did so much for me. A friend of mine named Larry Gregson was working at Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls, and he said that after Styx played there, as many people were calling for a Gowan show as for another Styx show. So he asked if I was interested in doing one. And it was great timing because I felt I had to do something for the 25th anniversary. But he also said that he thought I could do more than one and we ended up with three sold out shows that year. And then we did three the next year, and three the year after that. And because I had worked now for so long with [Styx drummer] Todd Sucherman I asked if he wanted to do the shows. And he loved Jerry Marotta who played on the album, so he did those shows. And Terry had been in my solo band since he was 19 years old. And so Terry came back too, so when we did those first shows, Terry and Todd instantly bonded as a rhythm section,” he explained.
“Every successive year, Todd would come up and play and they just became a natural fit. They speak the same language musically and it was a perfect combo. When Ricky was leaving the band, very early last year, before I even got involved in the conversation it had already been brought up that Terry should be the right guy, because he was already part of an established rhythm section with Todd. I came into the conversation by a day later and I thought, ‘wow, I know that’s going to be perfect. I know that he knows this music.’ We’re of the same blood as far as our musical taste goes when it comes to progressive rock anyways. We both worship at the altar of Genesis and Yes. So we have that entirely in common and Todd and Terry had played about 200 shows together at that point, so the wheels were already greased.
“And he came in and did this, quote/unquote ‘audition’ and it was one of the funniest days, but I don’t think I’ve been prouder of him. We booked a theater in New Jersey for an entire day, starting at 8 a.m. and it was set to finish around 11 or midnight. We were done after one run of the show. The crew were like, ‘you guys can run it again.’ Don’t need to. We tore everything down. We were out of that theatre by three o’clock. He just hit it out of the park and has every single night.”
Brothers are brothers are brothers. There’s always an ‘interesting’ dynamic when brothers are involved together in a creative enterprise, especially a band. Starting with the Everley Brothers, through the Davies brothers (the Kinks), Chris and Rich Robinson from The Black Crowes and the most famous of reconnected brothers – Liam and Noel Gallagher – it can get a little heated at times.
“It’s a combination of feelings [sharing a stage with Terry in Styx]. Brothers in a band, that’s actually a tough thing to navigate. If you don’t believe me, try to think of a band that has brothers in it who didn’t all end up at each other’s throats. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Even the Bee Gees. It’s just built into the situation. When it came to him being in the band, we talked. We had that conversation. I talked to Tommy Shaw about it and told him that Terry’s a perfect fit. It makes the most sense. But brothers fight. We do fight. And we fought a lot and probably will keep on fighting. But I said to Tommy that we decided that we’re both working for this band, not for each other. Terry’s not working for me in the Gowan band,” he explained.
“Terry has done his own thing and been very successful. He’s put together some fantastic corporate private shows with people like Martin Short and Leonard Cohrn. He’s done all this stuff in my absence. And at times I was included in some of those where I was more or less working for him. So we talked and decided, let the family dynamic, let the egos and the sibling rivalries that exist, even in the best of families, let’s put them in their place and just be kind of proud of each other’s accomplishments. And that’s really how I feel. I feel very proud that he’s exceeded the expectations here. Everyone’s really happy with him. But, you know, I’m still the boss!”
An earlier addition to the band happened not long after COVID when the band’s producer, who had been writing a significant amount of the material on the last couple of albums, Will Evankovich was asked to become a full member, including as part of the live show.
“Just like the story with Terry, Will’s story makes perfect sense. Tommy was doing a solo album back around 2010 and he’d begun to work with Will through Jack Blades [Night Ranger] and of course Tommy was in Damn Yankees and later Shaw/Blades with Jack. They went out and did a tour together and it was Jack who suggested they bring along his friend Will in from Santa Rosa, California, to act as kind of a musical director. So that’s when Tommy started working with Will and realized this guy’s incredibly talented, not just as a musician and songwriter, but he also had these emerging production chops that were quickly getting better and better. He just had this innate understanding of classic rock and analog gear, And that’s how I met him. At the time he had a band called American Drag and they wound opening a couple of shows for Styx so I saw him then. Then the next thing you know he had joined The Guess Who, as it existed at that point, with [original members] Jim Kale and Gary Peterson and they did a few shows with us in America so I got to see him onstage with that,” Gowan said.
“As you know I’m a Guess Who aficionado. I’ve had little associations with everyone in that band, a little bit with Randy Bachman and quite a bit actually with Burton Cummings, and what really struck me was, you know it was great to see Jim Kale and Gary Peterson together again, but I talked to Will after as told him I was standing side stage and how his guitar tone matched Greg Leskiw [who replaced Randy Bachman in 1970] sound and how he also matched the Kurt Winter [who also joined the Guess Who in 1970] sound. Most people can toil away and try to get the Randy Bachman sound, but they always miss the Kurt Winter sound. I just mentioned how well he sculpted that sound. So I was impressed with that.
“And then suddenly around 2014, Tommy came in with this song, ‘Mission to Mars,’ and played it and told us he played it for Will and then they wrote another song, ‘Red Storm.’ And by that time I was getting involved in the album [which would become 2017’s The Mission] and we decided, ‘let’s make Will the producer and co-writer on songs where we feel it works best.’ I learned quickly that he had a real direction in mind for this whole thing, just as a producer should. He became the arbiter, more or less, so that within the band, we didn’t have to fight with each other. That was really important. So, we made The Mission and when we went to play The Mission live about a year later for a special show in Las Vegas, we realized we needed a third guitar. Oh, and Will sings a little bit on this song, so let’s have Will come and join us on those shows. So he came on stage and played along with The Mission. A couple of months went by, and we went to do the same show in Boston, playing the whole album, and this time we thought, instead of having him come on and off stage, let’s have him on for the whole show. It’s not going to hurt. Well, not only did it not hurt, it was great. So then the pandemic happens. After that, we made Crash of the Crown and by then he had cemented himself so integrally into the band, he had become such an important part that we realized he’s going to be on stage for those songs too, so why don’t we just put him in the band? And that was it. That’s where we are now.”
This fall, Styx hits the road again starting Sept. 10 in Decatur, Illinois, with shows bouncing around most of the continental U.S.A. before wrapping up 2025 Dec. 5 in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Two shows in California mark the start of 2026, with Gowan also having a number of solo shows throughout the fall and into next winter and spring back home in Canada.
“We’re going to do a full tour of Quebec in November and then we have the big Strange Animal 40th anniversary blowout at Massey Hall in Toronto on Nov. 29. That’s the big pinnacle for the end of the year. But there’s already Gowan shows booked into 2026 and I think we’re going to try and get out to western Canada again. I was able to do St. John’s. Newfoundland this year, and I want to get more into the eastern provinces as well. Styx might be coming to the Maritimes next year too, we’ll see,” he said.
For more information on Styx, the band’s touring plans and Circling from Above, visit: https://styxworld.com.
For more on Gowan’s plans moving forward, visit; https://lawrencegowan.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
