{"id":7888,"date":"2025-07-19T11:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T11:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7888\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T11:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T11:08:09","slug":"styx-says-literal-space-junk-inspired-circling-from-above-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7888\/","title":{"rendered":"Styx Says Literal ‘Space Junk’ Inspired ‘Circling From Above’ Album"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe band that sings about having too much time on its hands has been using it wisely in recent years. Circling From Above, out Friday (July 18), is Styx<\/a>\u2018s 18th studio album and third in seven years.<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhat\u2019s driving the group\u2019s output? \u201cWell, we\u2019re always writing,\u201d singer-guitarist Tommy Shaw, Styx\u2019s most prolific composer (alongside former member Dennis DeYoung), tells Billboard during the group\u2019s current Brotherhood of Rock Tour with the Kevin Cronin Band and former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. There\u2019s also a strong partnership with Will Evankovich, who produced 2017\u2019s The Mission, 2021\u2019s Crash of the Crown and this year\u2019s Circling From Above (he became a full-fledged member of the band in 2021).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWill and I live close to each other (in Nashville),\u201d Shaw continues, \u201cso we get together a lot and co-write things. But the other guys are great co-writers, too; we\u2019ll get together at my house or at Will\u2019s studio and we\u2019ll start cobbling these pieces together\u2026. Somehow, luckily, we\u2019ve always been able to bring these songs and pieces together and tell a story, and that\u2019s the best thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe California-born Evankovich, who first worked with Shaw on his mid-90s Shaw Blades project with Night Ranger\u2019s Jack Blades, adds that all of the Styx albums he\u2019s been involved with \u201cbasically happen organically. There\u2019s stuff Tommy and I were writing at first, and then involving Lawrence (Gowan, singer\/keyboardist), they just took off on its own. It wasn\u2019t premeditated. Tommy\u2019s always writing; he\u2019s 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\u2019re gonna sell.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile there were certainly thematic threads within The Mission and Crash of the Crown, both Shaw and Evankovich are quick to downplay any notions of Circling From Above as a concept album. \u201cNo, we\u2019re not trying to make a concept album,\u201d Shaw explains. \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to stay on the same track. That\u2019s what interests us, to make it interesting to the person listening to it and tying it all together like that. I think that\u2019s fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCircling From Above does start from a specific idea, however. Shaw \u2014 whose avid interest in birds helped put a European starling on the album cover \u2014 says the Pink Floyd-esque title track, which slides into the equally proggy first single \u201cBuild and Destroy,\u201d was inspired by a continuing interest in outer space. \u201cThere\u2019s an app I discovered a while back where you can look up and see all the space junk,\u201d he says. \u201cIt blew my mind that all this stuff is floating around up there. Every piece of equipment that\u2019s up there, that\u2019s basically junk, is owned by a country and that country knows where it is and is responsible for it. It\u2019s organized chaos, but it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEvankovich says the other 11 tracks on Circling From Above are not as interdependent. \u201cPretty much after that (the album) is its own animal,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt becomes like a Beatles\u2019 Rubber Soul, where every song\u2019s a little different.\u201d But, as producer, he sought to create a sonic unity in applying elements of what can be considered classic Styx, helping the band sound more like its rock radio-dominating \u201870s and \u201880s era than it had for a number of years.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe 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,\u201d Evankovich says of the band, which has placed 23 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (including eight top 10s and one No. 1) over the course of its career. \u201cNone of it is premeditated; it just kind of falls into the Styx universe by virtue of the fact you have James Young and Chuck Panozzo (co-founders) and Tommy Shaw in addition to the new guard, which is Gowan, Todd Sucherman (drums) Terry (Gowan, bass) and myself.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen 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\u2019re a vintage band. So these (recent albums) have kind of merged the two; we\u2019re 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 \u2014 which I love, by the way. But this is the mantra now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShaw and Evankovich say Circling From Above is definitely a full-band project \u2014 even more than Crash of the Crown, which was conceived and finished during Covid. \u201cWhen JY plays, you know who it is,\u201d Shaw notes. \u201cWill knows JY (James Young) very well and he knows JY\u2019s style of playing and the types of things that we depend on JY to put into a song, because they\u2019re signature things.\u201d Young makes his mark in particular on the fluid solo for the bouncy, theatrical \u201cKing of Love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat\u2019s great is we\u2019re always thinking of each other,\u201d Evankovich says. \u201cWe have in our minds that, \u2018This is gonna be a great JY guitar solo, this is definitely his vibe,\u2019 or \u2018This is a great Tommy spot.\u2019 The song will tell you who we should we feature, and we all want to lift each other up.\u201d Terry Gowan, who had been playing with his brother before being tapped to replace Ricky Phillips after his departure in 2024, added upright bass to the mix on \u201cBlue Eyed Raven\u201d (with Shaw on mandolin) while Panozzo played on the short interlude track \u201cEase Your Mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Styx playing 1977\u2019s triple-platinum The Grand Illusion in its entirety this summer, the group has only been able to work \u201cBuild and Destroy\u201d into its live set to date. But it\u2019s looking forward to adding more of the Circling From Above songs into dates later this year, including the Rockin\u2019 in Paradise Cruise during October. \u201cWe\u2019ll definitely get to that as soon as August is over,\u201d Evankovich says. \u201cPeople come to see the great catalog of music the band has, but I think by September we\u2019ll probably work a few new ones in there, probably two or three once we\u2019ve cycled the Grand Illusion album.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Circling From Above is just out, the idea of another album is not far from the Styx members\u2019 minds. \u201cIt\u2019ll just take an amassing of songs, like it did for The Mission and for Crash of the Crown and for this album,\u201d Evankovich says. \u201cOnce there\u2019s three or four and we\u2019ve got a thread going, then we start. It takes a few years because we\u2019re playing 100 shows a year and away from home about 170 days out of the year, so finding the time is always challenging. But it always seems to happen, and I\u2019m confident it probably will again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The band that sings about having too much time on its hands has been using it wisely in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,5453,341],"class_list":["post-7888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-genre-rock","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}