WCSX Classic Cuts : Come Sail Away
WCSX Classic Cuts
Styx: “Come Sail Away”
The Hook: Wanna get away?
Year Released: 1977
Album: The Grand Illusion
Writer: Dennis DeYoung
Stats: Went to number-eight on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Background: Former singer and keyboardist Dennis DeYoung tells us that he conceived the song following the band’s first-ever performance in Hawaii. Back in Chicago in the dead of winter, DeYoung was thinking that a trip to a tropical paradise sounded like an awfully good way of “escaping from one’s troubles and problems.”
Former Styx singer-keyboardist Dennis De Young on what inspired “Come Sail Away.” OC:…in there. :27
“We’d just played the Crater Festival in Honolulu — first time I was ever in Hawaii — and I was just fascinated and overwhelmed by the beauty. I come from the midwest, and it was a song about escaping from one’s troubles and problems. And I remember writing it in my living room, and we had horrible snow in Chicago ’77-‘8-‘9. It was just ten feet of snow and I was sitting at my piano and remember looking out that window thinking about the beauty of Hawaiian Islands. And that’s why the metaphor of sailing away is in there.”
