Styx guitarist James "JY" Young is featured in a new Guitar World Q&A. Following is an excerpt from the interview.
Q: When was the last time you practiced and what did you play?
Young: "I’m a lazy guitarist. When I was a teenager, though, I’d practice eight hours a day until I got my chops up to speed. And then when we got a recording contract, I continued to practice a lot for the first three or four albums. But then ultimately, I realized I was never going to be a great player like Tommy Shaw, so I guess I’m just a power-chord and single-string lead player now. But I’m pretty good at it!"
Q: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Young: "I’ve been kind of blessed along this highway of life I’m on, so I wouldn’t change a thing. You do learn from the bad, and we’ve had some bad stuff. And when you celebrate the good, you try to duplicate the good stuff as you go forward. So you try and work out why that thing was good and then try and figure out some other way to make it work again.
Sometimes (the good) could be something as simple as lifting a little thing from another type of music or just listening to another new instrument. Tommy Shaw, for example, breaks out a mandolin every now and then. We had a song called 'Boat On The River' that sounds like an Eastern European folk song, and it was a huge hit all over Europe, yet we couldn’t get any traction at all in the States or Canada or anywhere else in the world with it."
Read more here.
In the video below from AXS TV, Styx band members Tommy Shaw and James Young recount what it was like to work with Dennis DeYoung and the series of events that led to him leaving the band.
Listen to the full interview now on Dan Rather's Big Interview podcast, available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and additional podcasting platforms.
Styx, will be taking the Las Vegas stage once again for an unforgettable five-night engagement at The Venetian Theatre inside The Venetian Resort Las Vegas. The shows will be held on January 26, 27 and 31 and February 2 and 3, 2024. All shows are scheduled to begin at 8:30 PM.
