Dennis DeYoung Says Farewell By Going Back To Where It All Began

Breaking news heard here first at American Songwriter: Dennis DeYoung is reneging on his promise that his recently-released album 26 East, Vol. 2 will be his last. He has one condition though: “I will make another album if Beviglia buys 250,000 of this last one,” he vows. “I got my price.”

All right, maybe this writer doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to bring DeYoung’s condition to bear. But rest assured this is not a retirement for DeYoung, who will still tour and occasionally release new songs as he writes them. If it is to be the last long-playing utterance from the former Styx frontman, 26 East, Vol. 2 is a properly grand way to go out, a heady mix of anthemic rockers, touching ballads, and, yes, even some proggy profundity like the early days.

In a sprawling interview, DeYoung tells American Songwriter how much the outpouring of support he has received for both volumes of 26 East (the first came out last year) has meant to him. “First and foremost, all people who aspire to do these things, to try and gain approval that they never thought they got from one or both of their parents, or whoever raised them, to try and fill a need or a hole in themselves, whether real or imagined,” he says. “Looking for approval, reinforcement, love that they never felt they got. And that’s why people aspire to great heights.

“Without fans, you’re in your basement. It’s just that simple to me. I don’t think I have ever consciously in my life treated a fan shabbily when they’ve met me. I go way out of my way to be aware of the fact that without their support, I’m a school teacher and a frustrated musician and a guy who really sits around all day long wondering why he never got what he thought he deserved from life. These people have erased all those thoughts from my mind, which is a huge thing.”

DeYoung originally thought he was going to be doing just one grand finale until the owner of his record company asked for a follow up. That caused him to rethink how he would apportion the material that he had in the hopper.

“I had seven songs written, recorded and mixed from Volume 1,” he says. “I had to divide them. I had to keep some songs that I thought were marvelous off the first record, because you couldn’t front load it. I didn’t want to read these reviews: ‘Dennis’ Volume 2, he should have stopped after Volume 1.’ So I divided them. And that’s just a guessing game. Then I wrote four songs during the pandemic. All I was trying to do, and that’s all I’ve ever done, is just to write the best song in the time allotted.

“The subject matter of the music: It’s an old fart who’s not going to talk to you about twenty years from now. He’s not going to say, ‘Don’t wait for heroes.’ Because I said that as a young man. Now, I’m going to reflect. I’m going to try to put into music and words the things I believe I’ve learned and the things that are still a mystery that I won’t ever know the answers to. That’s all I tried to do. And I thought it would be nice to have some good melodies.”

Love songs have always been one of DeYoung’s strong suits, and they’re well-represented on Vol. 2, although he insists that only one on the album was written as a way of paying tribute to Suzanne, his wife of over 50 years. “‘Your Saving Grace,’ though dedicated to my wife, it’s not a love song,” he explains. “My wife did save me at one point when I needed being saved. But when I wrote this song, it was dedicated to the concept of a higher power. It can be taken either way. We want to be saved. We feel small, insignificant, incapable. I sat down to write my take on ‘Let It Be.’ It had a lot of permutations. But my wife acted in that role for me on Earth.”

“Made For Each Other,” however, was written, without a doubt, for his wife. “And I told her this is the last one, so don’t bug me,” he jokes.

DeYoung also addresses the folly of modern mankind on songs like “Little Did We Know” and “Isle Of Misanthrope.” He explains his concerns, specifically when it comes to social media: “We’re broken. Humanity is broken. I’m gonna say it. It’s not the connectedness of social media. It’s the anonymity. It allows human beings to act out with their worst angels. It’s a worldwide audience.

“I’ve been trying to lead a campaign that says bring back the fistfight. You say something, say it to me, and I’ll punch you in the fucking face if I don’t like it, and you can punch me back. That will stop that stuff. But now there is no risk. Consequence to action is what all religion is based on. It’s how you keep these apes with brains too big from killing each other. Now it’s a free-for-all. The technology has allowed that to happen.”

Still, DeYoung isn’t giving up on us. “Human beings are such a mysterious bunch,” he marvels. “When people will say the stupidest, self-destructive things and live a life that supports those self-destructive tendencies, and then turn around and run into a collapsing or burning building to rescue people that they don’t know. This is too much for my old brain. I’m having a hard time putting those concepts together.” 

While most of the material on the album came naturally, DeYoung did write one track mindfully as a way of capturing the vibe of Styx’s ambitious origins. “The one song where I said, ‘Ok, I’m going to sit down and do this specifically’ was ‘Isle Of Misanthrope,’” he explains. “Because of the rather tortured history of Styx and my unceremonious exit, it took this fan base and split it apart. You have a small minority in the middle that will say they like both, the new and the old. And you have camps that seem to hate one or the other. This is a tragedy for me personally to imagine that Styx fans either hate me or Tommy (Shaw). It is a disgusting thing to live with.” 

“So I said ‘It’s 1975. What would you do?’ And I wrote ‘Isle Of Misanthrope.’ Pulling from the Wooden Nickel records and the first four albums on A&M. I went there and did that.”

DeYoung went back even further on “Hello Goodbye,” paying tribute to the Beatles while also referencing his first musical fumblings with brothers (and future Styx members) Chuck and John Panozzo. “This is how it happened, 26 East,” he says, referring to their Roseland, Illinois roots. “That basement. Three nobodies. Me playing accordion. Chuck was barely a guitar player. And John was a good drummer. There we were. That’s how it turned into this thing.”

And to bring it full circle, DeYoung closes out this swan song of an album with “GIF,” which is essentially a brief rehash of Styx’s classic “The Grand Illusion.” He was struck by how those words, written about 45 years ago, suited the current occasion. “What I say there, ‘Deep inside we’re all the same,’ those are the last words I sing in my recorded career,” he contends. “I couldn’t make it up in my mind to be any better.”

As for his former band, which still enjoys an active recording and touring career, DeYoung just wishes that certain fans would stop trying to pit one entity against the other. “I’ve said from the beginning, when I first saw this stuff happening in the 2000s when the fan base would just go right at each other,” he says. “I asked them please stop doing that. It’s heartbreaking to me. Rejoice in the music that was created by us. We all know that the music that we love is created by people who are imperfect. It’s the things they try to create, they’re trying to rearrange the world and their small part to make it perfect.

“Styx is a four-letter word. That’s all it is now, to me. It’s come to represent too many things, in my opinion. It’s just a word. That’s a legal term now. The only things the fans should concern themselves with, whether I create it or the other guys create it, is the music. Put all the other stuff aside. If you hear something that I do that you love or that they do that you love, that’s all you need to know. After all, our goal was always to please people.”

DeYoung is also happy that his music, both old and new, means so much to so many people, even if those meanings sometimes diverge from his original intent. “We played ‘Come Sail Away’ at my Dad’s funeral,” he says. “And when I wrote it, I couldn’t imagine it being a funeral song. It was a song about yearning and hope. Is there a greater compliment to have that song chosen for someone you love as they move on to the next thing? I can’t think of it.

“You read the fans’ comments on YouTube sometimes and you say, ‘Well that’s completely fucking wrong,’” he laughs. “But then you stop yourself and say that doesn’t matter. Because it’s not mine, It’s theirs.”

Photo by Kristie Mayfair Schram