James Young Quotes

The band we have now on stage is the band I always wanted to be in.

Sometimes that mantle is hard to adjust to wearing but we are at a stage that we are comfortable with it and we recognize how we are perceived and how the real core individual that each one of us has apart from the facade that the public believes that we are.

In my own mind, we are a much happier and much more functional family and a much more well balanced group of individual s both off and on the stage – in the current incarnation.

Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.

Being in a rock band is about touring. It’s about writing songs and it’s about making records but it’s also about taking a wonderful smile onto that stage and making the people feel good about themselves.

And I said – Styx – as a musical group it is our place to reflect the light that is shining on us back onto this place and say – this is where so much great stuff started.

We always got a strong response but I think in this day in age there is less of a marijuana fog at concerts and more of people just more naturally exuberant – it seems to me.

We’re gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we’ve got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry’s piano player.

Whereas with us – what you hear is what’s happening right then and there on the stage – so we don’t need no stinking technology.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.

There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.

So, it’s a matter of that I want to take our music around the globe.

And in an era where radio stations that are inclined to play Styx music are your classic rock stations and the stations that play current music look at us as dinosaurs – the only way we could reach people with our new music, generally, is to perform live.

Seeing our VH-1 Behind the Music shows just how dysfunctional some of the moments of the band were but this new line-up has put the fun back in dysfunction.

Ten years ago, in 94, we thought maybe nobody would ever care about Styx again.

People like to let loose at rock concerts and it gives them an excuse to do it in a way that is not destructive to others and not really destructive to the band.

Yes, indeed, in fact I would tell you that we go out of our way to be true to the original feeling and sort of sonic and musical pallet that we painted with back then.

So, maybe you don’t see blues so much in Styx’s music but it is definitely part of Tommy’s early music.

But, there was a time when we all had a great thing going but one person just became very uncomfortable with it and he had to try to change it around to suit him more and then it suited no one else but him.

It is something we have always excelled at and prided ourselves at – the excellences of our stage performance.