Any of the million people who have recently gone online to see a 73-year-old Dennis DeYoung effortlessly sing the Styx hit “The Best of Times” like a young pomp-rock buck of 19... well, at that point you’re won over and ready for the man’s first solo album in 13 years, a record that delivers all the magic that made Styx great in their heyday, sprung from a logic-defying fountain of youth.
26 East: Volume 1 is all that and more, DeYoung collaborating with a man of equal top-shelf talent, namely Jim Peterik, the two of them crafting lush powerful pop, a bit of heaviness, a bit of prog, some poignant balladry and a number of surprises along the way, including a duet with Julian Lennon.
The record is deliberately autobiographical, charting DeYoung’s roots in the music biz stretching all the way back to 1961. “Yeah, but we weren’t really serious,” says DeYoung, dismissively. “We didn’t become a rock band until we saw The Beatles, and that took a couple of years. Before that I played the accordion. I didn’t play rock music. So we didn’t get serious about music until after The Beatles, and then really serious until after the five originals ended up in the same place in 1970. And that’s when we started doing demos. But before that, no, we were just making money, playing gigs, having a laugh.”
So that history is referenced, and then the arrival of fame, when DeYoung found out Styx was to have a lot of enemies — cue this record’s “With All Due Respect.”
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