Quotes from Dennis DeYoung

There are no electric guitars. 'Hunchback' has arias; it's operatic.

Americans are really good at throwing their hands up and walking away from things.

Every artist thinks his most recent work is his best. If you didn't feel like that, you wouldn't do anything.

I was ill in '98. By the end of '99 I was recording and recovering.

Heck, I feel guilty getting my senior discounts.

If you have talent and you work really hard, it increases your odds but it doesn't ensure anything. But every now and then, the universe must tilt in your direction.

What people fail to realize is that any album we did, really, 90 percent of it reflected the songs people brought in. If someone had brought in two great rock songs for 'Cornerstone'... they would have been on that record.

Is there anything in life more exhilarating than having 15,000 people absolutely ecstatic to be seeing your human form?

Look, nobody is a bigger fan of Tommy Shaw than me. The day I met him in 1975 I knew he was going to be a great guitar player, performer and songwriter. I was his biggest fan, and I'm Styx's number one fan.

Really, the amount of work I do on a project, I will torture myself.

I don't see how 'Hunchback' could ever appeal to children. It's a very adult story that deals with repressed sexuality.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.

My brother-in-law, Chuck, whom I have known since we were teenagers, is a disabled veteran who was wounded while fighting with the marines in Vietnam. I've been around to observe how the war affected his life and the problems that veterans have, and I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a song about Vietnam.

Over the years, I thought many times about how my life would have changed if I had been drafted and Styx never had happened. Even if I hadn't been wounded or emotionally scarred, it would have changed my whole timetable.

It's great when it all comes together in a great musical like 'Sweeney Todd,' when Stephen Sondheim writes songs from heaven, the book is good and the staging is good. But it's very rare when that happens.

The fact is, for the first 10 years I toured as a solo artist, I wasn't playing any of the songs I didn't write or sing.

After being replaced in Styx, everyone around me encouraged me to try and stop them legally. I just couldn't. It would have been like suing myself and I held out hope they'd ask me back. They toured under the STYX name for a year and a half before I initiated legal action. I didn't sue for money or use of the name. I simply wanted back in the band.

Touring is real demanding. You swing between sadness and euphoria. But for us to cry about it isn't fair.

I think a lot of bands would rather put mediocre rock tracks on their album to try to maintain some sort of testosterone badge of courage.

We came along at a time when people were really focused on music. We were part of the second generation of bands after all of those great 60's bands when rock was still in its' infancy.

When I play the first few notes of a song and people start screaming, I think: 'That's why I did this. That's why I wrote this song. That's a good job.' And it is a job.

This is no condemnation of Chuck Berry, who I greatly admire. But Chuck Berry's music will not translate as well to orchestration because of its very three-chord rock 'n' roll nature. It is the music of the artists that are more pretentious, pompous or closer to the kind of big dramatic stylings that orchestras are good with.

Our music did not sound like the Beatles in any way, shape or form. I could never find it in myself to use those Beatles tricks in Styx records because they were sacred to me. But what they did always influenced my thinking.

I made 'Desert Moon' and when I made those solo albums, I was trying not to be Styx, because I thought, 'That belongs to us.' So, I made different kinds of solo albums that were not dipping my hand back into the magic Styx jar and pulling out all the tricks - because bands, they have tricks, don't they? That's what makes them different.