A brief chat with Styx

Yellow Scene: Any sign of a new album? It’s been a while…

Ricky Phillips: You know, it’s not really the recording industry so much as the touring industry anymore. We used to tour after recording a record, and promote it. Now it’s basically bands who have any kind of a fanbase that they’ve built up with a long-running catalog. If you think about it, a successful record today would have been a huge failure in sales what we used to do back in the day. So it just hasn’t been at the top of the priority list. That said, everybody in Styx is still a songwriter, we all continue to write songs and we continue to help each other in recording certain parts in songs. We always have, ever since I’ve been in the band. So there is a looming record, probably in the near future, it’s just that our main focus is that we’re on the road over 200 days in the year, and finding the time on a tour is hard. The live show is the most important thing. But I get asked that all the time, and it is very important to us. Songwriting and recording is a blast. We all have our own home studios, and we all continue to write music for various things, so why not Styx? It’s about time, I think.

YS: Are you looking forward to these dates with Def Leppard and Tesla?

RP: I didn’t realize it had been so long, but we haven’t toured with Def Leppard for seven years. We’re very close friends with all the guys in the band, and their crew and our crew get on well. It’s a really nice compliment music-wise, it’s just different enough. It gives the audience a lot. And then with Tesla coming out, they come out with both guns blazing and play a nice, straight-ahead rock show. It’s a really good night of music.

YS: Do you like playing Colorado?

RP: It’s funny you should say that. When people ask about our favorite places to play, we always say Red Rocks, although we’re not playing Red Rocks this year. I like to play golf, and Joe Elliot, Rick Savage [from Del Leppard] and I get out and play golf on our days off. One of my favorite golf courses in the country is Arrowhead out in Denver. I feel like I’ve been dropped in Jurassic Park or something. It’s just gorgeous, unbelievable.

YS: What can we expect from the set?

RP: It’s gonna be hit-driven, because we don’t have any more time than that. When you have three bands on the bill, it condenses your set down a bit, so really there no time to get into b-sides or anything. We found a way to make it fun for the diehard fans, and the show has a really good flow. I think we’ve been one of the sleeper tours on the summer, because we’ve been selling out almost every venue across the country. We’ve been lucky with the weather, and the audiences have been awesome.

YS: What’s next, after this show?

RP: We continue on. We’re gonna do another run through Canada, just an evening with Styx. We have shows all the way into December. I’ve heard that we have all sorts of different things being proposed. We have a fanbase that likes to take a vacation, travel and see all of our shows for two weeks. We’ve gotta change it up so it’s interesting for those people. We do what we can.