Bluegrass, I like. Tommy Shaw, I like. But together? You couldn’t help but wonder how ‘The Great Divide’ would ever work. But it did.

Although remembered for pop hits like “Come Sail Away” and “Babe,” Styx began as the Midwestern answer to Yes or King Crimson.

Styx’s Tommy Shaw has just completed a video shoot with former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. “Wash Away,” which they co-wrote together, is the new single from Felder’s current solo effort Road to Forever.

Only two members of the Eagles had longer tenures than Don Felder, and that gives him unique insight into the band’s inner workings.

Styx fans remember well the year 1979 and Cornerstone, an album that began a decisive turn away from prog rock for the band — with its capstone moment being the epic ballad “Babe.” From there, it seems, the group was on a collision course

At the moment of Styx’s earliest breakout successes, as it achieved these first- and second-ever triple platinum-selling albums, the band was already starting to go its separate ways.

Styx is hitting the airwaves and the roadways again — even as Tommy Shaw, James “JY” Young, Chuck Panozzo, Lawrence Gowan, Ricky Phillips and Todd Sucherman celebrate the upcoming DVD release of Styx: The Grand Illusion/Pieces Of Eight Live

There’s a world-weary melancholy, a hard-won realism, to Styx’s new song that didn’t exist in Tommy Shaw’s fun-rocking “Renegade” days, and that points the way out of the band’s more recent habit of backtracking

What a record we got after a long layoff for Alice Cooper: ‘Brutal Planet’ was a gut-punch.

A band suspended forever between the formalism of Dennis DeYoung’s Broadway pretensions and the harder-edged banalities of James Young and Tommy Shaw, Styx sounded different every time it came on the radio. Yet, critics insisted, somehow the same: Mediocre.