There are not many songs you can hear performed fifty years later by the person who wrote and originally sang them and reasonably wonder whether they might sound even better now.
That thought did not occur to me before Styx took the stage at the Kia Forum on September 6. It came much later in the set, after the guitars, after all the color, after watching a band with more than five decades of history perform with surprisingly little interest in behaving like a museum piece.
By the time Tommy Shaw sang “Crystal Ball,” it became difficult to think about longevity simply in terms of years.
Photos: see the full Styx at the Kia Forum portfolio album.
Styx was sharing the evening with Chicago on The Windy Cities Tour – All the Hits…Your Kind of Tour, bringing two bands with enormously recognizable catalogs into the same building. Styx went on first, opening at approximately 7:20 p.m. and working through a 15-song set that reached from the 1970s all the way to music released in 2025.
That span is impressive on paper. It felt more interesting in the room.
Light as Part of the Show
The stage was already telling a different story than the one I expected. Styx’s production was incredibly bright and colorful, sometimes washed in saturated purples and blues, other times burning red, orange or gold. Large beams moved through the stage from behind the musicians, cutting through haze and creating layers of light around them.
At certain points, “lighting” almost felt like too ordinary a word for it.
There were moments when it looked magical.
One of the things that stood out while photographing the show was how frequently the lighting changed the shape of the stage. A musician could be nearly swallowed by color in one moment and then isolated under one narrow white beam in the next. From farther back, bodies became silhouettes against enormous walls of light. Up close, those same lights picked out individual performers and briefly made the Forum feel smaller than it was.
It gave the show a visual rhythm of its own.
Guitars First
And underneath all of it were guitars.
Lots of them.
Styx came out with “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” followed by “Lorelei,” and the guitar work immediately gave the set more weight than someone coming primarily for the familiar radio singles might expect. The riffs were not little accents tucked between vocals. At times, the guitars seemed to drive the entire room.
Tommy Shaw, James “J.Y.” Young and Will Evankovich repeatedly moved the attention back toward the instruments. There was something satisfying about watching a band this established still allow sections of a song to simply be about playing.
The musicians moved toward one another. They played off one another. Guitar moments were allowed to become moments rather than being hurried along so everyone could reach the next chorus people recognized.
That immediately separated the performance from the kind of legacy-tour show where the audience spends the evening waiting for a checklist of hits.
New Music, Early in the Set
The third song brought the first major bridge between Styx’s history and where the band currently is.
“Build and Destroy” comes from Circling From Above, Styx’s eighteenth studio album, released in 2025. It was the only selection from that record in the Kia Forum set, but placing something that new this early was significant. It arrived before “Lady,” before “Too Much Time on My Hands,” before “The Grand Illusion” and long before the enormous closing songs people knew would eventually come.
They made the audience meet present-day Styx before settling comfortably into the past.
That choice made more sense as the night went on.
Circling From Above was produced by Will Evankovich, who also produced the band’s two previous studio albums, The Mission and Crash of the Crown. Its thirteen songs were written in different combinations by Shaw, Evankovich and Lawrence Gowan.
Evankovich therefore occupies an unusual position in this version of Styx. He is one of the newer faces onstage, but his fingerprints have been on the band’s recent music for years.
That matters in a show like this.
When a band reaches the point where its catalog can comfortably fill an entire arena set without anything written in the current decade, continuing to make new records becomes a choice. Styx could easily spend every night moving from one recognizable song to the next and nobody buying a ticket could reasonably complain.
Instead, they are still making things.
Songs Everyone Already Knows
“Lady” followed, then “Too Much Time on My Hands” and “The Grand Illusion,” beginning a stretch that made the size of the catalog almost impossible to ignore. These are songs that have existed for so long that many people in the Forum probably no longer remember the first time they heard them.
They just know them.
That creates a strange dynamic at an arena concert. The first notes can trigger the audience before a singer has even opened his mouth. People recognize a song from a guitar tone, a keyboard line or a fraction of an intro and the reaction travels across the room.
Styx had plenty of those moments.
But what interested me more was how much musicianship remained underneath the recognition.
The vocals were strong throughout the set, but Styx also benefits from having several distinct voices rather than asking one frontman to carry an entire night. Shaw, Gowan and Young each bring a different presence, and the movement between guitars and keyboards keeps the stage from settling into one visual focal point for too long.
Lawrence Gowan in particular is almost impossible not to watch.
The keyboard portions of the show had a different visual quality than the guitar-heavy sections. Under purple and blue lighting, with a sharp white spotlight sometimes falling across the riser, the enormous stage could suddenly become very focused. The surrounding arena disappeared a little.
Then the guitars would come back in and everything would expand again.
That constant expansion and contraction was one of my favorite parts of the production.
Even when the lighting was at its brightest, it rarely felt like color thrown onto a stage simply because an arena show is supposed to look big. The cues followed what the band was doing. The lights helped create movement. They separated sections of songs, framed solos and sometimes turned the musicians into silhouettes.
It gave me a lot to photograph, but more importantly, it gave the music another layer without competing against it.
Fifty Years of “Crystal Ball”
After “Light Up” came the part of the show I remember most clearly.
“Crystal Ball.”
The song appeared on Styx’s 1976 album of the same name, which was Tommy Shaw’s first studio album with the band. In 2026, the song is fifty years old.
Fifty.
That number was acknowledged from the stage, but not in the predictable way of simply pointing out an anniversary.
One of the band members stopped to talk about Shaw and what the audience was actually hearing. The point was essentially this: think about how difficult it is to name a song written fifty years ago where the person who wrote it and sang it then can stand on an arena stage today and still sing it like that.
Maybe even better.
The Forum responded by getting to its feet.
Tommy Shaw received a standing ovation.
It did not feel obligatory.
There are standing ovations that happen because a crowd understands it has reached the part of a show where standing is expected. This felt different. It was recognition.
Because once someone pointed it out, it was difficult not to think about how absurdly rare the situation actually was.
“Crystal Ball” has now existed for half a century.
People have aged with it. Someone who first heard it at sixteen is now in their sixties. Someone bought that album when it was new. Someone heard it in a car that no longer exists, in a house they no longer live in, with people who may no longer be here.
Entire lives have happened around that song.
And the man who wrote it was standing in front of us singing it.
That was the point in the night when Styx’s longevity stopped being a statistic to me.
The fascinating thing was not simply that Shaw could still perform “Crystal Ball.”
It was that the song did not require the audience to lower its expectations because fifty years had passed.
There was no sense that everyone needed to politely meet the performance halfway.
He could sing it.
That standing ovation became one of those concert moments that probably means more after you leave than while you are inside it.
The Introductions Explain the Band
Immediately afterward, Styx moved into the band introductions before “Rockin’ the Paradise.” Normally, introductions can become one of the least interesting parts of a concert review, names and years that matter much more to devoted fans than everyone else.
Here, the introductions helped explain why the band feels the way it does in 2026.
Todd Sucherman was recognized for three decades with Styx. He initially came into the Styx orbit in the mid-1990s and became the touring drummer during the 1996 Return to Paradise period.
Thirty years behind the drums would represent an entire career in most bands.
In Styx, it somehow makes him part of the middle of the timeline.
That perspective is almost funny.
Then there are the genuinely newer additions.
Terry Gowan joined Styx on bass in 2024. He is the younger brother of Lawrence Gowan, who has himself been with Styx since 1999. Terry stepped into a band with enormous history while also joining his own brother onstage every night. The current Styx lineup therefore contains relationships measured in fifty years, thirty years, twenty-plus years and only a couple.
Will Evankovich is another example of why “new member” does not quite tell the whole story.
He officially joined Styx in 2021 after years of working with Shaw and producing the band’s recent records. He produced The Mission, Crash of the Crown and Circling From Above, and has been deeply involved in songwriting during Styx’s current creative period.
So while he may be comparatively new standing onstage as a member of Styx, he is not new to the music this version of the band is making.
The lineup feels less like old Styx with replacement parts and more like a band that has continued absorbing people into its history.
That distinction matters.
Color, Contrast and the Big Songs
After the introductions, “Rockin’ the Paradise” brought the guitars back to the front and the show pushed ahead through “Our Wonderful Lives,” “The Best of Times” and “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights).”
By then, the lighting had moved through seemingly every possible color.
The visual design was especially effective during the bigger songs because there was always enough darkness left somewhere on the stage to give the light dimension. Brightness without contrast can flatten an arena show. This did the opposite.
Light came from behind.
It cut diagonally across the band.
It built shapes in the haze.
At times there were musicians standing almost completely dark against a field of color, which made the stage look larger because your eye had to search through it.
At other times, there was nowhere else to look.
Chuck Panozzo Sails In
“Come Sail Away” closed the main set, with founding bassist Chuck Panozzo joining the band. He remained for the encore as well.
His appearance added another layer to a night already full of them.
This is what makes Styx difficult to describe only as a “classic rock” band. That phrase tells you the era in which much of the famous material originated, but it does not tell you what is happening onstage now.
On this particular night, “now” included a founding member, musicians who have spent decades in the group, musicians who joined only recently, a song turning fifty years old and another song released only the year before.
All of those things occupied the same set.
And somehow, none of it felt stitched together.
After “Come Sail Away,” Styx returned for an encore of “Mr. Roboto” and “Renegade,” with Panozzo still onstage.
Those are the kinds of songs a band could practically allow the audience to perform for them.
Instead, the energy remained high all the way through the end.
What Styx Is Now
That may be the biggest thing I took away from Styx at the Kia Forum.
Before a show like this, it is easy to assume that history will be the story.
Of course it matters. You cannot watch Tommy Shaw sing something he wrote fifty years ago without thinking about time. You cannot watch Chuck Panozzo walk onto a stage without understanding that you are seeing part of the band’s original history. You cannot hear Todd Sucherman introduced after thirty years and not notice just how long this story has been running.
But history was not doing the heavy lifting.
The musicians were.
The guitars were loud. The vocals held up. The lighting was ambitious and beautiful. The stage stayed active. New music was given space next to songs that have been around for generations.
Nothing about it suggested a band asking the audience to love what Styx used to be.
They were showing them what Styx is now.
And that is why I keep coming back to “Crystal Ball.”
Half a century is an enormous amount of time to ask any piece of music to survive.
It is an even more enormous amount of time to ask the person who created it to stand in front of thousands of people and still make them believe it.
When the Kia Forum stood for Tommy Shaw, they were acknowledging the fifty years.
But they were also acknowledging something more difficult to accomplish.
After all that time, the song was still alive.
And so was the band playing it.
Next Stop: Las Vegas
The Kia Forum was not the last stop. Styx has fall dates running from early October into December, including a run through Canada, and then opens 2027 with a January 8 show in Lincoln, California, alongside Cheap Trick.
After that, the band returns to The Venetian Theatre at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas for five nights: January 29 and 30, and February 3, 5 and 6, 2027. It will be the seventh consecutive year Styx has played the room.
I plan to be in that room for my birthday.
It will also mark the night I introduce Styx to Gen Alpha, starting with my young daughter.
I believe this is the type of music she should be exposed to. Not as a history lesson, but live, played by the people who made it.
Fifty years after someone first heard “Crystal Ball” at sixteen, she may get to hear it for the first time from the man who wrote it.
Dates and tickets: Styx: Live in Las Vegas at The Venetian · full Styx tour schedule.
See the full Styx at the Kia Forum photo gallery.
Follow Styx: Official Website · Instagram · Facebook · X · YouTube · TikTok · Spotify · Apple Music · Bandcamp · Tour Dates
More live coverage: Deep Purple and Kansas in Long Beach and Chance the Rapper at the Hollywood Palladium.
Sources
- Styx setlist, Kia Forum, September 6, 2026 (setlist.fm)
- Styx band members (Styxworld)
- Circling from Above (Wikipedia)
- Crystal Ball, 1976 album (Wikipedia)
- Will Evankovich (Wikipedia)
- Todd Sucherman (Wikipedia)
- Styx: Live in Las Vegas, 2027 dates (The Venetian Resort)
- Styx to return to The Venetian Resort Las Vegas in 2027 (FOX5 Las Vegas)
- Styx fall 2026 tour dates (Ultimate Classic Rock)
- Styx adds 2027 dates (Ultimate Classic Rock)
