Rock history is full of songs written about bandmates. Most of them are attacks. “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” is something rarer: an intervention. In 1977, Tommy Shaw — the newest member of Styx, barely two years into the job — looked across the rehearsal room at Dennis DeYoung, the band’s keyboardist, chief songwriter and resident worrier, and wrote him a five-and-a-half-minute pep talk disguised as a progressive-rock single. Then he sang it himself, with DeYoung’s synthesizer swirling all around him.
Released in February 1978 as the second single from The Grand Illusion, “Fooling Yourself” climbed to No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 and did even better on the rival Cash Box chart. It was never the band’s biggest hit. But as a document of Styx at their creative peak — two strong-willed songwriters pushing against each other inside the same song — it may be the most revealing record they ever made. And its story has a twist worthy of the title: the longer Shaw sang it, the more he realised the angry young man might be him.
The New Guy Takes Aim
Shaw’s route into Styx was pure emergency. When guitarist John Curulewski quit abruptly in December 1975, days before a national tour, the band launched a frantic search and remembered a young guitarist from Montgomery, Alabama, whose Chicago-managed band MSFunk had crossed their path. Shaw flew up to audition. “I got on the plane and went up there the next day, and they didn’t ask me to play the guitar at all,” he later recalled. “The guitar never came out of the case.” Once he proved he could sing the high harmony on “Lady,” he was hired.
His first album with the band, Crystal Ball (1976), was even named after one of his songs. Shaw’s commitment was total: when “Come Sail Away” was released, he personally travelled from studio to studio, coast to coast, pleading with radio stations to play it. But it was during the run-up to The Grand Illusion that Shaw studied his new bandmates properly — and formed an impression of DeYoung that he discussed as early as a 1982 interview with broadcaster Mary Turner. DeYoung was, in Shaw’s first reading, an “angry young man”: someone who viewed every Styx success with a wary eye and slid into anger or depression at every setback. This was a band that had waited a decade for its break, and its leader seemed constitutionally unable to enjoy it.
So Shaw wrote the observation into a song. “Fooling Yourself” is not a sneer; its argument is almost tender. The angry young man of the lyric is told that his cynicism is a con trick he’s playing on himself — that the good fortune he’s bracing against is real, and that life improves the moment he stops expecting the floor to collapse. It is advice bands almost never give each other in public, set to some of the most intricate music Styx ever put on a single.
A Pep Talk with a Prog Engine
For all its radio success, “Fooling Yourself” is built like a progressive-rock suite in miniature. It opens and closes in 6/8, led by Shaw’s acoustic guitar figures and answered by DeYoung’s synthesizer melodies. The vocal sections settle into straight 4/4, the better to carry the argument. Then the instrumental middle breaks loose into a synthesizer solo in 7/4, and near the end there is a brief two-measure feint into 5/8 before the 6/8 meter returns for a final synth solo and the fade.
There is a delicious irony in the arrangement: the song telling DeYoung to lighten up gives DeYoung’s keyboards the starring instrumental role. The personnel is the classic five-man line-up — Shaw on lead vocals and acoustic lead guitar, James “J.Y.” Young on electric rhythm guitar, DeYoung on keyboards, Chuck Panozzo on bass and John Panozzo on drums — and the record sounds like what it was: two musical temperaments, Shaw’s folksy directness and DeYoung’s theatrical sweep, discovering they could complete each other. Record World, reviewing the single in February 1978, heard the blend precisely: the song “starts acoustically and builds with synthesizers and guitars to a swirling finish,” and its message was “both positive and cautionary.”
Second Single, Slow Climb
The Grand Illusion was released on 7 July 1977, and its first single, DeYoung’s “Come Sail Away,” sailed to No. 8. “Fooling Yourself,” backed with the album’s closing miniature “The Grand Finale,” followed in February 1978 — a Shaw song succeeding a DeYoung song, the band’s internal balance made visible on the release schedule.
Its chart run was a grind rather than a rocket. The single peaked at No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1978, spending 14 weeks on the chart. On the Cash Box Top 100 it did considerably better, reaching No. 12. North of the border it hit No. 20 on Canada’s RPM Top Singles chart in the week of 6 May 1978, and it also charted in the Netherlands (No. 28) and Australia (No. 42). Respectable numbers — though the song’s real home, like so much of Styx’s catalogue, turned out to be FM album-rock radio, where its modest peak has long since been forgotten and its presence never really faded. Nearly fifty years on, Parade magazine was still describing it as a rock-radio classic and a fan favourite that outlasted its chart position.
Inside The Grand Illusion
The album around the single explains its mood. The Grand Illusion was Styx’s seventh studio album, and the band leaned into the numerology: it was released on 7/7/77, a date chosen deliberately for luck. Recorded, like Equinox before it, at Paragon Recording Studios in Chicago and produced by the band, it peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, finished among the top ten albums of 1978 in the US year-end chart, and went Triple Platinum in America — three million copies — with a further Platinum award in Canada. Its cover painting riffs on René Magritte’s 1965 canvas The Blank Signature, a hidden rider in a forest: an image of something that isn’t what it appears.
That is the album’s whole subject. The title track, “Superstars,” “Miss America” and “Castle Walls” all circle the same question — what does success do to the people who finally get it? Posterity has been kind to the record: Classic Rock critic Malcolm Dome rated its title track as Styx’s all-time greatest song, and the album itself finished at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 year-end chart for 1978 and reached No. 7 in Canada as well as No. 6 in the United States. “Fooling Yourself” is the theme stated as personal advice rather than allegory: fame’s first casualty, Shaw suggests, is the ability to believe your own luck. Shaw returned to the same territory in “Man in the Wilderness,” written after watching Kansas perform in Detroit. The Grand Illusion was the moment Styx’s two songwriters found one shared obsession — and the tension between DeYoung’s wariness and Shaw’s impatience with wariness is the engine of the whole record.
The Song That Turned Around
Here is the twist Shaw himself has acknowledged over the years. The portrait was drawn from life, aimed at DeYoung — but the longer Shaw lived with the song, the more he began to see himself in its lyrics, and it took on a more personal meaning for him. The pep talk became a mirror. That double exposure is built into the song’s afterlife: audiences who know the backstory hear both men in it at once, the worrier and the friend who was certain worry was the problem — and who learned, touring the world as rock’s uncertainties mounted, that the worrier had a point.
Musically and personally, then, “Fooling Yourself” marks the high-water line of the Shaw–DeYoung partnership: close enough to read each other honestly, confident enough to say it in a song, and skilled enough to make the confrontation danceable in three different time signatures.
Why “Fooling Yourself” Still Stings
“Fooling Yourself” endures because its situation never dates. Every band, every office, every family has an angry young man — and someone who loves him enough to tell him the anger has become the obstacle. That Shaw delivered the message inside a hit single, on an album that sold three million copies in America alone, with the subject of the song playing synthesizer all over it, makes it one of the great backhanded love letters in rock.
No. 29 was never the point. The point was the conversation — and Styx were never more worth listening to than when they were having it with each other.