"We were slammed and that's the weird thing; we all kind of joked that we couldn't wait to get back to work so we could stop working so much,” laughed Styx keyboardist Lawrence Gowan as he talked about the band’s workload during the COVID pandemic, their new album “Crash Of The Crown” and the ever changing fan base to which they’ve grown accustomed. “It was really fun actually, because we kept ourselves extremely busy working on this record and I'm really glad that we did because it has already connected so well with people. We did a bunch of streaming things too so we could stay connected with the faithful out there throughout; let's call it, "The Break."
When a band has been as wildly successful as Styx, it is certainly no accident; hard work and ever evolving strategies have kept them a top selling and concert draw for decades. So, one may wonder why they don’t just rest on their laurels and do as many of their peers and tour using their past hits with no new offerings added to their catalog. According to Gowan, the band has never even considered slowing down as is evident by this latest release; pandemic or not.
"It's been a couple of pretty wild years if you think about it; hasn't it? We started this album at Tommy's studio in Nashville prior to the pandemic. We got all of the songs written there and kind of scoped and mapped it out and we got a good chunk of our vocals, particularly our background vocals done there in Nashville. It was when the pandemic began that we decided to finish the rest of the album by recording our parts in our studios in the various cities where we were because after the first three months of the pandemic, we realized that these songs were so relatable to what people were going through that we should really make an attempt to finish them off as recordings. Then by late August or September of last year the Zoom calls and through an app that studios use called Audio Movers; you can be in remote studios around the world and be hearing the others in real time and actually hear the person playing through the monitors in studio and not sending emails back and forth. So, I could hear Todd from Austin, TX in his drum room which is one of the most sophisticated on Earth and Tommy Shaw and Will Evankovich in studio in Nashville and then I was in my own studio in Toronto which holds all of my vintage keyboards and I was able to utilize all of those on the album in real time and it actually played well into our hands as how to finish the record. Ricky Phillips, Chuck Panozzo and James Young wound up flying to Nashville and finished most of their parts in Tommy's studio and we had the album done and then we played it for Universal and they were really excited about it and came up with a great plan on releasing the record by saying, "Let's hold onto it until it's simultaneous with you guys starting to tour again" and they held it until June 18 and we did our first show announcing the record on June 16 and two days later it came out and 10 days after that it hit number one on Billboard's Rock Album Chart and it is backordered now already. Universal said they were going to need another album ASAP because this one is doing really well; so, that's the story of the last year plus and the making of "Crash Of The Crown."
With the success of their last studio album, “The Mission,” which took the band further back into its progressive rock past; they’ve decided to continue down a similar path with this new release but Gowan stops short of saying that it is a “Concept album.”
"It's 15 tracks but if you look at how short the songs are; I think the longest song just hits four minutes; these are short little pieces and one bleeds into the other and you're into the next song before you even know it,” he began to explain. “We used the template of a progressive classic rock record that is only going to be 40-minutes long because the side of a vinyl album can only be roughly 20-minutes per side before you start losing fidelity. So, we knew it was going to be 40-minutes long and instead of amalgamating these into one song; you know how you can take three or four pieces and say, OK, this is one song? We kept them individual, kind of like; we kept harkening to side two of "Abbey Road" where short little pieces suddenly flow into the next song and the next one and before you know it; you haven't even realized you've turned a corner. That's why the 15 tracks are very short in duration as individual pieces but as a long piece they basically comprise the 40-minutes that makes up the album."
"We've had success with the last two records approaching them that way,” he continued; “What is funny is that when something seems to happen to your detriment, there is always a good side to it if you look for it and for us, the fact that radio doesn't play new classic rock music because by its nature it has to be at least 25 years old I guess before it is classic but the form of the album suddenly came back to us and we said, there doesn't have to be a hit single. We said, what there has to be is a cohesive statement of music that lasts about 40-minutes, that is comprised of songs that interconnect in some way or in some way convey a similar sentiment where they are connected by their spirit and that is the concept. The Concept is that you are going to listen to this for 40 minutes straight, you're going to flip the thing over half-way through and you're going to hold the artwork and have this tactile experience that goes along with the listening experience and that really is where the concept comes from; it's what goes on in your mind as you listen to this whole piece and not lift the needle up and look for the single because that doesn't exist. It is all contained within the confines of the album and that's how we've approached this and that's why the songs that made it on, made it on because they fit within the boundaries of what we were trying to put together."
Even the title has an interesting flair; Gowan says that it is more inspirational than it may connotate.
""Crash Of The Crown" is a title; you can read a lot into that. There is all kinds of subtext to it etc. but the crash of the crown is the apex or the highest point on the mountain so to speak and if you look at it in a social structure or even physically; where whatever had achieved the ultimate achievement is suddenly pulled away. I envision it like a mountain, where if you suddenly chopped off the top of it, suddenly there is a volcano and what spills forth from the volcano is both terrifying and it also kind of signals renewal. So, when the crown in this case and you can read into that in any metaphorical way, when that suddenly has been wiped away all kinds of other possibilities spill forth. That is what is really put across in that song and so many of the songs on "Crash Of The Crown." The songs are about renewal and this is why we felt it so important to finish the record because it is about renewal after a cataclysmic event . A cataclysmic event like "Crash Of The Crown" or "Sound the Alarm" or "Save Us From Ourselves" or "Fight Of Our Lives;" all of these titles tie into that notion that whatever was perceived as the insurmountable is suddenly wiped away and that really relates to what the pandemic did. Who would've thought that the world could grind to a halt the way it did a year ago and yet it did. Suddenly, we've made all kinds of new discoveries that we could pull out of this; in some ways we could pull out of this better or worse depending on how you approach it."
Given the longevity of Styx and the various phases of their career; they have acquired multitudes of fans, so; has that fan base expanded and are they accepting of the new music? Lawrence says hat from his vantage point, things have come full circle.
"I've been in the band for 22 years; I'll break it into two decades. In the first 10 years that I was in the band, most of the audience that we played to around 1999-2008 were about 40 years of age; that was roughly the base demographic, mid-thirties to about 50 and they comprised the audience. About 12 years ago I began to notice a shift in the audience; this is just me from the stage taking my own little social cross-section. I began to notice clumps of younger people together at the shows; small groups that seemed to know the songs and of course we're playing all the classic Styx stuff. There has never been a show where we don't play "Renegade," "Come Sail Away," "Blue Collar Man," "Grand Illusion" and those are songs that have to be in every Styx show which is fine and they still are but every year for the last 12, those groups of younger people have been growing to the point where when I came off stage just 12 hours ago the front row of the show were all under 40 years of age; they weren't even born when the biggest Styx records were made! They weren't born until after 1980, 81 or 82 and I recently talked to Alice Cooper about this, he sees so many kids in his audience now; as do we, that we realized this is spanning generations. Classic rock and with Styx being part of that genre; classic rock is the great musical statement of the last half of the twentieth century. There are younger people now discovering it and also bands like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Genesis and Yes and these type bands and they want to go and see them! I went and saw my friend Tony Levin who has played on all of my solo records, he was playing with King Crimson and I was sitting next to a guy who was about 18 years old and he knew the whole Crimson catalog. Like I say, the audience now and the bulk of who bought the records and built the band into what it is now are around 50 to 60 years old but what I'm seeing at shows is a multi-age situation that runs from about eight to 80. When it comes to weaving the new songs into that, we do that in a very seamless way. For example, we open the show with "Fight Of Our Lives" which is the opening of "Crash Of The Crown" and that immediately bleeds right into "Blue Collar Man." So, they're into a classic song before they even know that they've heard something new. Then for example, by the time we get towards the end of the show, Tommy has already played "Sound The Alarm" which immediately morphs into "Crystal Ball." So, he covers 45 years of his career in a span of about 10 minutes without ever introducing it as a new song and because these two albums, "The Mission" and "Crash Of The Crown" sound like they're from the 70's because of the way we approached them; a lot of people don't realize that they've heard something new because if they are young enough they might only know "Grand Illusion" or "The Mission" or they might know "Pieces Of Eight" and "KIlroy Was Here" and that's it. So, we take them on this little musical adventure where we don't necessarily spotlight the fact that this is a brand new piece of music they're hearing and if you've heard "Crash Of The Crown," I have a tiny little piece that is only 40 seconds long called "Lost At Sea" and that sets up "Come Sail Away" now. So, that's how we have bridged the musical gap and the age gap has kind of bridged itself simply because younger people seem to love classic rock."
To find out more about “Crash Of The Crown,” upcoming tour dates and Styx in general, please visit www.styxworld.com.
That's it for this week! Please continue to support live and original music and until next week....ROCK ON!
