Art & Creativity Quote by James Young

Young’s line reads like a polite correction delivered with a guitarist’s long memory. He’s talking about Styx, a band often filed under prog-leaning arena rock: big choruses, polished arrangements, theatrical ambition. “Maybe you don’t see blues so much” concedes the obvious critique before it can land. It’s a preemptive disarm: yes, Styx doesn’t wear blues on its sleeve. But then he pivots to the real point - authorship and roots - insisting that Tommy Shaw’s musical DNA includes the blues even if the finished product doesn’t advertise it.

The subtext is about legitimacy in rock culture, where “blues” still functions as a kind of authenticity stamp. By locating blues in Tommy’s “early music,” Young reframes influence as personal history rather than stylistic branding. That matters because bands like Styx have long been treated as too “slick” to be taken seriously by purists. Young is saying: you’re judging the surface, not the foundation. The blues isn’t absent; it’s been translated, absorbed into melody choices, phrasing, and feel, then repackaged for radio and arenas.

There’s also a quiet band-dynamics move here. Young isn’t just defending Styx; he’s defending Tommy. The phrasing singles him out as a musician with deeper roots than the band’s reputation suggests, nudging listeners to hear the human lineage inside the gloss. It’s less about rewriting Styx’s genre than widening the lens on what counts as blues influence when it’s filtered through pop discipline and commercial scale.