I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
We just have to be ourselves.
Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.
So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.
We always got a strong response but I think in this day in age there is less of a marijuana fog at concerts and more of people just more naturally exuberant - it seems to me.
I'm a good collaborative writer. I can usually come in and add a couple lines to something, and add a riff or a B-section, or a bridge that will tie things together. I can do stuff like that. But to write a whole song, I don't have the patience for that, I guess.
And in an era where radio stations that are inclined to play Styx music are your classic rock stations and the stations that play current music look at us as dinosaurs - the only way we could reach people with our new music, generally, is to perform live.
Do you know. . . what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.
As Pope Francis says in Amoris laetitia, pastors must "make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them" (no. 37). As for the former statement, we should only be afraid if the church is smaller because of our failure to welcome people and preach the Gospel in a way that touches their hearts.
Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.
You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.