When I first started this list, I probably would have bet that there wouldn’t be a Styx song here.
It’s not that I dislike Styx, but I did get tired of them in the 1980s. There’s something about Dennis DeYoung that eventually bothered me too much, both in songwriting and performance. I’m sure that “Babe” was the final brick in that wall, but on every album there were DeYoung songs that were skippable.
But I had forgotten how I’d liked the Wooden Nickel greatest hits album of the early works of Styx, and particularly the song ‘The Grove of Eglantine’. Yeah, I was a teenage boy and had my first girlfriend and the song is fairly crude in a lyrical fashion. By 1979 I didn’t listen to it at all, and then one day earlier this year I gave it a listen.
And I was surprised how well it held up, musically. So here we go. And it even is a DeYoung song.