The Mission, Styx’s first new studio album in 14 years—originally released last June—will be re-released July 27th. The two-disc set features a CD of the original album, Blu-ray of The Mission in 5.1 Surround Sound, “The Making of The Mission Documentary” including exclusive interviews, four music videos, and three hi-res audio playbacks.

The Mission is a conceptual album based upon NASA’s planned 2033 6-manned mission to Mars. The album brings you on a wild ride starting from liftoff with their song “Gone Gone Gone,” to a journey that takes you a “Hundred Million Miles From Home,” on a “Mission to Mars.” To pre-order The Mission, click here.

I spoke with James “JY” Young, The Godfather of Styx, about the re-issue of their album, The Mission, and Styx’s current tour.

KG: You co-founded the band, Styx, 46 years ago. Back then, did you ever think that you’d still be on the road touring almost 50 years later?

JY: As a young man I had lofty goals for myself. I would write notes for myself to aim high, and I read some books about succeeding in life. I was a confident young man, but I don’t know that I ever would have imagined the success we've had—being as big as it was—or that it’s lasted, amazingly, this long.

KG: On tour, bands play their old music as well as their new, but “Mr. Roboto” has been off the setlist for 35 years, and just this year has it been added back in its entirety. It’s a fan favorite, so why has it been out of rotation for so long, and why bring it back now?

JY: Well, it’s not a fan favorite of really the first generation of Styx fans, which is what we've sharpened our teeth on, if you will, and it was kind of the thing that killed the first wave of Styx success and an alienated quite a few of our male rock fans. There's a member of the NFL Hall of Fame who'd been a huge fan of the band up to that point in time, but when he met me in ’84, he said, “I loved you guys up until that 'Mr. Roboto' song.”

It was our keyboard player, Dennis DeYoung, who was the creative leader really on a lot of levels in the band (certainly not on every level), but I mean it was a collaborative team, but Dennis insisted on making dramatic changes in management, and then in how we did things. We had four 3 million sellers in a row, The Grand Illusion, Pieces of Eight, Cornerstone, and Paradise Theatre. Paradise Theatre, we had 110 sold-out arenas across North America and six sold-out arenas in Japan, but Dennis wanted to change management, change this, change that, and then he had this concept thing that he said is going to just set the world on fire, and "Mr. Roboto" was a keynote song of that. It was very different, it was a big change for us, and I didn't believe in it at the time, but it obviously was a number one single, it really caught on, but it really did cut our album sales and our ticket sales in half—that's how our first wave of generation of fans responded to it. But that's a long time ago, and as we've gone down the line without Dennis starting in 1999, we just stayed away from that song because it did kill the first wave, and we were trying to come out with a little tougher rock sound.

Come now to 20 years of successful touring without Dennis DeYoung and we just took note of the fact that we were hearing from people around us like our lighting director, an amazing woman (probably the smartest person in the band or crew), who says every night at least one person comes up to her saying, “How come they didn’t play 'Mr. Roboto?'” Then our merch guy, who's standing out in the middle of everybody selling t-shirts to the fans, he says he's been bombarded for the last 20 years with people asking how come we didn’t play it, and so we finally gave in. (laughs)

KG: You gave the people what the people wanted.

JY: That’s part of the deal, I think, isn’t it?

KG: The Mission is Styx’s 16th studio album, how does its sound compare to Styx’s other albums?

JY: We’ve all been seduced by digital recording and how easy it is to accomplish certain things with it, but there's a certain sort of coloration distortion, if you will, to the analog sound, and we decided that we wanted to make a record that would go back to using 2-inch tape—like we did in the recording studio—and 24-track tape machines, and doing multi-track recording in the way we did in our heyday in ’77, ’78, ’79, ’80, ’81. We wanted to make a great sounding record, and we feel we accomplished that.

We're seeing a new younger audience, which is a great thing. It's still in the minority, but I’d say the second and third wave of Styx fans will maybe soon be the majority of fans that are showing up.

KG: The Mission is about a planned 2033 mission to Mars and the astronauts’ experience from takeoff and throughout their expedition. How did a space mission to Mars become the focus of a Styx album?

JY: Normally, because I am the one with the mechanical and aerospace engineering degree, people would have looked to me for something like this, but I’ve felt that if I might have ever come up with something like this it would have been, “Is that all you can come up with Mr. Space Engineer?” (I was only a C+ student anyway, but I did graduate.) But Tommy Shaw, he's got a sense of humanity and human emotion and an ability to put it into music and verse that is special, and he really did distill the humanity of this planned mission as to what happens if something goes wrong, how will people feel, and with song titles like “Hundred Million Miles From Home,” which even as musicians is a song we resonate with because you deal with separation from your loved ones 100-200 days a year, and a lot of times you're gone from home when someone important dies or someone important has something terrible happen and you’re 1,000 miles away from it, so there's a lot that resonates with what we do for a living in this mission to Mars. Tommy and his main collaborator, Will Evankovich, got this thing started and then Lawrence Gowan and myself then contributed some stuff to it, but it was Tommy’s idea that this would be a great thing—he was charmed by it—and we have lots of friends at NASA that coordinated with us over the years. Our diehard fans love it, and I have good feelings about how it will do over the long term.

KG: I was actually going to ask you about your degree. Since you have your degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, if you had the opportunity to go to outer space, would you?

JY: After seeing what they go through, no. Let me rephrase that; I'd love to go to the moon, but beyond that… Astronauts have to have a different mindset, I think, and I don't think I can get my brain all the way around that. Because of the distance and the things that you are required to do in order to survive up there, I think that I am just too old to consider it. (laughs)

KG: When NASA’s team of six men go to Mars in 2033, do you think they will listen to The Mission while they are up there?

JY: I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of great songs written about outer space before this one, and they may, or may not, want to do that. I mean, perhaps. I would be charmed by the notion, but some of these songs have to do with isolation and loss, and I think I would want to be surrounded by the most cheerful and uplifting music I could, because when you're staring at the bleakness of outer space around you and realizing how far you are away, I would want something that could put me back in touch with what it's like on planet Earth. So, some of the songs would probably go well, some of them I know I don't think I would want to listen to.

KG: I heard in a radio interview that you, Tommy, and Lawrence did when the album was first released last year that Pluto’s 5th moon was named Styx after both Greek mythology and their love of your band. With that being said, is there any chance that future songs may be about Pluto and its moons?

JY: You never know, but it doesn't sound like something that's going to inspire a song from me. There’s a lot of beautiful things that we surround ourselves with on planet Earth, and things that give us a sense of warmth and beauty, so I don't know that something that far away would inspire. We have so many things on planet Earth to inspire us, but you never know.

I wrote a song called “Man of Miracles” on our fourth album: “Fighting the solar windstorm the winged horse guides his way, Oracle of the ancient midnight calls forth everlasting day.” Very mythological. Greek mythology was something that I read as a child actually, so I can write songs based on that. Those Greeks, they were wild and crazy.

KG: “Come Sail Away” also had a spaceship theme, why is space travel a reoccurring theme in Styx music?

JY: Well, I think that one I have to take credit for, even though Dennis wrote the bulk of that song and is credited as the writer on it. It started as a song about a sailing ship, and this was 1976—we're creating this for release in 1977—and then I suggested that somewhere in the middle of the song, the sailing ship turns into a spaceship, and the dumb, lucky, wonderful thing about that was Grand Illusion came out in 1977, the same year and the same summer as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so “Come Sail Away” kind of became an outer space theme song. Although, in California, I'm told that all the surfers love it, because it kind of resonated with what they love to do out on the water, but it really is kind of an outer space theme, and we've sort of played that up, but that is thanks to the aerospace engineer in the band.

KG: Besides outer space, a reoccurring theme in The Mission album seems to be about following your dreams; is this a message that the band is trying to give to a new generation of fans—to shoot for the stars?

JY: Well, as I said, growing up I aimed high, and if you don't set lofty goals for yourself, and strive towards them... I think if your mind isn't there in the first place, your body can't follow. So I hope that we inspire people to do great things.

KG: What is your favorite song on the new album to perform and why?

JY: Well “Gone Gone Gone” is my guitar riff that the song is kind of based around, and so since I'm a guitar hotshot I'm going with “Gone Gone Gone.”

KG: Are you guys having fun on this tour?

JY: Oh, yeah. Behaving ourselves, but having a lot of fun. Well, maybe not completely behaving ourselves.

I feel blessed to be doing what I love to do and what I was set up to do as a teenager, and to still be doing it in my 60s, and I see no end in sight. I intend to do this until… recently, I was quoted somewhere saying, “They’ll have to scrape me off the stage,” is how I put it. All I can tell everybody is follow your dreams, and hopefully, some of them will come true.