The Simple Piano Motif That Ignites An Audience
Lawrence Gowan of Styx
Cris Cohen: In concert, there's that special moment when you start playing “Come Sail Away.” From an audience perspective, it really gives you the chills. You can just feel the (crowd) energy surge.
What's that like from your perspective?
Lawrence Gowan of Styx: It's one of these songs that starts with a very simple piano motif. And it portends that it's going to build into something really spectacular.
Prior to my joining Styx, in my solo career I had a song called “A Criminal Mind,” which Styx play now as well, occasionally.
It also starts with a plaintive piano motif. It has a kind of simple opening. And once people know the song, it's that simple, plaintive opening that I think ignites them, because they have this built-in anticipation of what's going to happen.
I remember when “A Criminal Mind” became a hit. I would get to the third or fourth note of the opening and be completely drowned out. I never heard really the fifth or sixth note. The audience would drown it right out. And that's in the days when we used regular monitors on stage, speaker monitors, before in-ears were invented.
But the beginning of “Come Sail Away” evokes the exact same response from people. So I kind of anticipated it when I joined the band.
To the degree, though, that it does has increased over the years. It's now embraced as something that I can't quite articulate. It feels like it's been part of people's lives now for so many decades, that it opens the door to all the various thousands of chapters that each person in the audience represents and how they've interpreted that song in their lives. So I feel that moment of elation happen.
But at the same time, musically, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I'll just focus on trying to give it the most honest rendition that I can deliver on the day, taking in everything that's in that audience at that moment. Because there's a kinetic energy that's just being passed around, like electrons that are flying everywhere.
And you're trying to kind of hold on to that and hold on to your sense of purpose at the same time.
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