Climb aboard a starship

If you, kind reader, like many of us, can envision only a future dominated by cultural disruption, climate crisis, gender wars and AI chatbots, let’s take a much-needed break from all that.

Ride with me instead on a perspective-altering voyage back to the late 1970s atop the musical swells of “Come Sail Away,” the still-resonating hit by the band Styx.

It’s a cheesy sonic fantasy, really, that somehow still captures the heart, decades on, with its soaring message that we should all, no matter the harsh life circumstance or scary global trend, seek to discover something more. 

Yes, I’m a corny romantic. I’ll never deny that nor how super sugary super-group Styx was a mainstay in the soundtrack of my youth. Many moons later, the music is baked into me and occasionally calls out. That’s why on a whim recently I queried YouTube for cover versions of “Come Sail Away.” I was both amazed and horrified by the results, some of which I will describe and link to below. Nevertheless, clearly the song remains affecting to people from all walks of life, people of all ages, people with a high tolerance for cheese.

The song’s origin in the mid-1970s is telling: sales of the previous two Styx albums, Equinox and Crystal Ball, had dragged and Styx band leader Dennis DeYoung was depressed. Possibly to shake off the sadness and rekindle ambition, DeYoung composed “Come Sail Away,” now viewed as a quintessential Styx song that contains almost all the band’s musical signatures: delicate piano, blistering keyboard, driving rock guitar, booming drum runs, and, of course, an anthem’s triumphant crescendo, this one marking the onset of fantastic journey, not aboard some sailboat but rather a “starship” headed for the skies.

“Come Sail Away” was the lead single from the 1977 album, Grand Illusion. It helped set the Chicago-based Styx on a new course to acclaim, putting astride the biggest bands in the world—something that may have moved the Styx players to repeatedly philosophize on success or lack thereof.

In later songs “Too Much Time on My Hands” and “Man in the Wilderness,” for example, introspective narrators share feelings of being deeply stuck, bereft of direction. In “Renegade,” the voice of a jailed outlaw awaiting the noose cries out to his mother with regret for having caused her so much pain.

Through triumph and tragedy, Styx seems to ask: are any of us anything except the sum of our navigational choices?

Damn the torpedoes

In the first lines of “Come Sail Away,” DeYoung’s encouraging and upbeat narrator shares that he’s decided to boldly venture into uncharted waters—but there’s something else: he graciously invites us along, switching grammatically to the second person, now vividly describing where “we” are going to go. Yet this ship’s captain is no neophyte he and speaks from a place of grounded experience. He pauses, for instance, to consider lost, youthful dreams and stoically admits “somehow we missed out on the pot of gold.”

Does the song’s timeless “everyman” appeal help to explain the bizarre assortment of recent bedroom-made covers that topped my YouTube search results, each of them musically impressive, yes, cringey-as-fuck, exactly like Styx itself? Let’s take a look.

• First there’s this highly impressive solo acoustic version by a fellow named Mike Masse who features his young children in the video wearing white navy outfits, clearly reflecting on the wonderful life journey that he’s had as a father. It’s as cheesy as cheesy gets and it made me cry.
• Then there’s this simply astonishing teen band version by Leave Those Kids Alone that accurately reproduces the original track and is performed so enthusiastically that it literally gives you hope for the future of humanity.There’s also this inventive-yet-claustrophobic version by a talented adult outfit called The Band Geeks, jammed into a basement along with a bevy of instruments and copious musical gear.

• Lastly, there’s this wind-swept and precocious version by an all-girl assemblage called, well, Precocious, which may best illustrate how the song continues to captivate young people today.

(As a bonus, if you’re really keen, here’s one of those “first-time hearing” videos where contemporary music lovers react to the song cold, with no previous knowledge of it.)

Epilogue: the dreamer in a dreamland

What might these home-made versions tell us about the need to “Come Sail Away” in modern life in the west?

Is the song’s stubborn optimism and focus on the future something that’s missing in our polarized, nitpicky, “everything’s offensive” contemporary culture? Are we too focused on our flaws to dare consider all that we could be? Have the post-modernists won? Do we really think that there is no new territory left to explore? 

On the Styx album that followed Grand Illusion, DeYoung offered a much-lesser-known song called “Borrowed Time” about how America needed to pick up it’s bootstraps and get back to work on realizing its potential. After lamenting how his promised land has devolved into a place of opaque truths and political bickering, DeYoung defiantly cries out in a refrain:

Faith be with me now, I’m just a dreamer in a dreamland

Faith be with me now, I’m just a dreamer in a dreamland

But you, kind reader, are not a dreamer, you say? That’s okay. Me neither. I’m an opportunist and just about that everything I ever needed to know about life choices I may have learned from Styx.

“Come Sail Away” says to us, individually and collectively, yes, you’re gonna fuck up, your illusions may be exposed, your civilization is far from perfect, but let go of the past and venture forth, good people. There, and only there, you will encounter wonders.