BMGStyx released its 2003 album Cyclorama via digital and streaming outlets for the first time ever today.
Cyclorama was the band’s 14th studio effort and, until the arrival of the 2017 concept album The Mission, was the group’s most recent collection of original songs.
The record includes “Waiting for Our Time,” which reached #37 on Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. Cyclorama was co-produced by Styx’s Tommy Shaw and James “JY” Young along with longtime band studio collaborator Gary Loizzo, who began working with the group in 1974. Loizzo, who died in 2016, also had been the lead singer of the pop group The American Breed, which scored a top-10 hit in 1968 with “Bend Me, Shape Me.”
In conjunction with Cyclorama‘s digital release, a new lyric video for the song “These Are the Times” has premiered at Styx’s official YouTube channel. The clip also pays tribute and serves as a thank-you to first responders and frontline workers who have been helping people while potentially risking their own health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s amazing how a song that was created in a certain timeframe, can fit into another timeframe 17 years later and that is the case with ‘These Are the Times,'” notes Young. “It’s even more amazing how this song encompasses the current world situation, and that it can fit into a song so beautifully. It’s a fascinating thing.”
Reflecting on Cyclorama in 2019, Shaw described it as “kind of an experimental record, just to see where we were as a band after having reformed in 1999.”
Meanwhile, Styx is asking fans to consider donating to the Pittsburgh Emergency Action Fund, which bestows grants on emergency service providers and charities aiding in recovery efforts in the Pittsburgh area during the coronavirus crisis.
By Matt Friedlander
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