BY BRIAN RANDALL — JUNE 18, 2021

Throughout their history, Styx’s biggest integral change has been their rotating cast, but with certain key members being steady following their Wooden Nickel years (1972-74), their sound has stayed pretty “Styxy” since conception. Most everyone knows them from such classic radio hits as “Come Sail Away” and “Too Much Time on My Hands,” but the genius of Styx has lost no momentum in close to 50 years of music-making. As their producer Will Evankovich observes, “In 40-plus years, you’d think you wanna be creative, but for some people, it wanes.” That said, he continues, Styx members “can’t really live a day in life without thinking about a song.”

Recent excitement comes with Styx’s newest studio album, Crash of the Crown, which is being released today, June 18, 2021, on all major digital platforms, vinyl, and CD. There has, however, been somewhat of a major shift in the Styx world, one that should have rocked the boat yet somehow hasn’t — as in, they’ve continued with Will Evankovich as their producer for Crown, the second studio album with him behind the board (his work on June 2017’s The Mission was the first). Does this mean Will is a part of the Styx family? Either way, his staying on for another album says quite a bit about Will the artist.

You can see it easily in such classic hits as “Come Sail Away” — Styx is no ordinary rock band. With that in mind, what do we call them? Certainly not pure prog rock and not hard enough for hard rock (as in, not being metallic enough), and yet if you had someone with no clue to Styx’s existence and pulled various excerpts from their catalog, you might get some varied “genre-esque” impressions. A more recent example, the title track from Crash of the Crown, offers this display in a stunning fireblast of musical colors packed tightly into about four minutes of music that really doesn’t sound jam-packed.

In its three minutes and 46 seconds, I counted seven styles all within the overarching genre of rock. So, objectively speaking, you could say it’s akin to prog. But have you listened to it? There’s no way you can’t call this music straight-up “rock music,” and it’s much easier to listen to for a casual audience member than much of the prog repertoire. When you hit play, you’re thrown into a theater. With your eyes closed and some good headphones, you can almost see the characters onstage doing something. (What they might be doing, I have no clue, but it seems pretty badass.)

“Crash of the Crown” flows like the best rock operas, with stylistic interplay like the strands in a weaver’s basket, keeping Styx’s integrity alive in form, style, timbres, contrasts, and every other element that keeps Styx Styxy. Naturally, this statement leads right back to the top: Styx hasn’t lost their momentum. They’ve somehow maintained their Styxy sound in a changing musical environment for almost 50 years, and yet they’re collaborating with someone who has relatively little Styx experience as their producer. And not just any producer, but a man who seems to have been born in some kind of Styxmember production factory to the point of co-writing and performing much of their music alongside guitarist/vocalist Tommy Shaw (and the rest of the band, of course). While there are a few bumps in the creative road — like when Tommy will say to Will something like, “I don’t know if that chorus sounds Styx-ish” — Evankovich seems to fit in better than imaginable.

Fortunately for me, a lot of these against-the-odds type situations make a bit more sense — after all, I was lucky enough to have an exclusive interview with the man himself, Will Evankovich, about these very concerns during a recent Zoom call. What I gathered from Will wasn’t a series of cut-and-dry kind of methodologies on “how I made Styx sound better,” but rather a personality profile that made me go, “Well, duh — he’s gonna make any band sound good, and have a blast doing it.”

Will is the kind of guy who could be reading you an instructional manual verbatim, and you’d still get from him that he embodies a statement he made during our interview: “They say in the business, ‘It’s all about the hang.’” Why do I mention this? Well, to embark on a career integrating yourself as one of the most important contributors to a band almost 50 years into their existence, it takes a guy who knows how to hang to create and align chemistries.

When I asked Will how he gets such good results out of his collaborators, he replied, “If you’re shy, you’ll have a lot of trouble. You have to become their buddy, and become their friend. It helps the experience. It starts with people and personal relationships first, and then the music will follow.” Making music with people empathetically informs Will’s statement, “There’s no one in the world who has your vision.” He means you have to try and see their vision and hope they see a little of yours — and, in the wash, the product ends up pretty damn good. But with all that said, it’s just half of the music-making package that comes with Will Evankovich.

He isn’t just a great empath or socialite, he’s a wizard in his element. “You wanna be good at a lot of things in this business because you diversify your ways to have fun,”believes Will. Well, that explains his Wikipedia page saying he’s a singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist, vocalist, bassist, and mandolinist. His breadth also adds a certain depth to his knowledge a lot of other musicians wouldn’t get, further exemplifying his credentials as Styx’s producer. But other than his technical mastery and knowledge of his craft, he has a way of thinking about music that would make it possible for him to be one of the only artists fully welcomed inside the tight Styx circle in nearly 20 years.

When I asked him, “How do you keep it Styx-ish?” Will replied, “You look at the elements of music that kind of make a sound” — in his case, that means the Styx sound. It’s as if Will has synthesized all of Styx up until June 2017 (the release date of his first full studio album with Styx, the aforementioned The Mission) and made certain his production choices would only be made with regard to this synthesis of the entire Styx canon. Now, he may or may not have done this — after all, that’s a pretty daunting and niche task — but whatever he literally did, this was the result. Mind you, he isn’t the only person “deciding” the Styx sound, of course. . .

Earlier, I mentioned Will saying the band can’t really live a day in life without thinking about a song. That’s the momentum I was talking about. But this momentum comes from the band as a collective. Will provides an energetic personality and unique perspective, and guys like Tommy Shaw challenge Will’s fire with fire to create a massive bonfire of musical display. It’s seemingly impossible for them to stop making music together when they start. Will can push the limits sometimes — as noted earlier regarding choruses perhaps not sounding “Styx-ish” enough — but all in all, Will’s immense musical maturity and taste make him the perfect addition to the Styx family.

Will Evankovich has already proved himself worthy of helping create great Styx albums by producing both Crash of the Crown and The Mission, aiding with musically effective moments where the audio could have potentially rendered a listener unhappily disoriented. With great promise found within today’s studio album release of Crown and more than likely others to come, Styx seems like they’re in pretty good shape for the future — especially with the input of this new musical maverick, Will Evankovich.

The SoundBard notes: As a student, Brian Randall attended a seven-week online course I taught on the art of writing about music and pop culture for kaboomcollective.org. This is his first article.