How Literal ‘Space Junk’ Inspired New Music From Styx

The band that sings about having remaining day on its fingers has been the usage of it properly lately. Circling From Above, out Friday (July 18), is Styx‘s 18th studio copy and 3rd in seven years.

What’s riding the gang’s output? “Well, we’re always writing,” singer-guitarist Tommy Shaw, Styx’s maximum prolific composer (along former member Dennis DeYoung), tells Billboard throughout the gang’s tide Brotherhood of Rock Excursion with the Kevin Cronin Band and previous Eagles guitarist Don Felder. There’s additionally a robust partnership with Will Evankovich, who produced 2017’s The Venture, 2021’s Clash of the Crown and this age’s Circling From Above (he was a full-fledged member of the band in 2021).

“Will and I live close to each other (in Nashville),” Shaw continues, “so we get together a lot and co-write things. But the other guys are great co-writers, too; we’ll get together at my house or at Will’s studio and we’ll start cobbling these pieces together…. Somehow, luckily, we’ve always been able to bring these songs and pieces together and tell a story, and that’s the best thing.”

The California-born Evankovich, who first labored with Shaw on his mid-90s Shaw Blades venture with Evening Ranger’s Jack Blades, provides that the entire Styx albums he’s been concerned with “basically happen organically. There’s stuff Tommy and I were writing at first, and then involving Lawrence (Gowan, singer/keyboardist), they just took off on its own. It wasn’t premeditated. Tommy’s always writing; he’s a very creative guy, and I think finding a new writing partner galvanized his interest. But we do it because we want to do it, not because of how many records we’re gonna sell.”

Era there have been for sure thematic yarns inside The Venture and Clash of the Crown, each Shaw and Evankovich are fast to downplay any notions of Circling From Above as an idea copy. “No, we’re not trying to make a concept album,” Shaw explains. “We’re just trying to stay on the same track. That’s what interests us, to make it interesting to the person listening to it and tying it all together like that. I think that’s fun.”

Circling From Above does get started from a selected thought, then again. Shaw — whose avid passion in birds helped put a Eu starling at the copy barricade — says the Crimson Floyd-esque name monitor, which slides into the similarly proggy first unmarried “Build and Destroy,” was once impressed through a seamless passion in outer length. “There’s an app I discovered a while back where you can look up and see all the space junk,” he says. “It blew my mind that all this stuff is floating around up there. Every piece of equipment that’s up there, that’s basically junk, is owned by a country and that country knows where it is and is responsible for it. It’s organized chaos, but it’s a junkyard up there. As we discussed it in the studio we were getting ready to write songs, and that influenced some of the lyrics and ideas kept popping off and we had those two songs that go together.”

Evankovich says the alternative 11 tracks on Circling From Above aren’t as interdependent. “Pretty much after that (the album) is its own animal,” he explains. “It becomes like a Beatles’ Rubber Soul, where every song’s a little different.” However, as manufacturer, he desired to manufacture a sonic solidarity in making use of components of what can also be thought to be vintage Styx, serving to the band tone extra like its rock radio-dominating ‘70s and ‘80s future than it had for quite a few years.

“The recipe has always been big harmonies, these car horn-stacked vocals, and the great synthesizers and guitars, and we still adhere pretty much to that recipe,” Evankovich says of the band, which has positioned 23 songs at the Billboard Sizzling 100 (together with 8 supremacy 10s and one Incorrect. 1) over the process its occupation. “None of it’s premeditated; it simply roughly falls into the Styx universe through use of the truth you’ve gotten James Younger and Chuck Panozzo (co-founders) and Tommy Shaw along with the brandnew secure, which is Gowan, Todd Sucherman (drums) Terry (Gowan, bass) and myself.

“When they took that hiatus from Cyclorama, the record industry was in a state of flux and things were a little confusing about selling new music, especially if you’re a vintage band. So these (recent albums) have kind of merged the two; we’re at an age now where the attention span is pretty quick, so we try to compact all the greatness that we can into three- or four-minute songs rather than do those longer, stretched-out songs — which I love, by the way. But this is the mantra now.”