Lorelei

This alliterative song ("Lorelei let's live...) is about a guy who is over-the-moon for a girl named Lorelei, and hot and heavy to cohabit with her. In German mythology, Lorelei is the name of a water fairy (siren) who lived in the Rhine River. When her lover didn't return, she jumped to her death from a large rock where the river narrows. Her spirit is said to inhabit that rock, drawing sailors into it as they pass by and meet their doom. Wishbone Ash released a song with the same title a few years earlier.

"Lorelei" was written by Styx guitarist James Young and keyboard player Dennis DeYoung, with DeYoung on lead vocals. The song is about Young's wife Susan, whom he married in 1972. "The idea of co-habitation was still looked down upon in the old-fashioned world that I was born into," Young said in a Songfacts interview. "My parents weren't happy about it, but they adapted. We moved in together and my better half decided we should make it legal, so we went to city hall and got married. That's a pretty standard notion for a rock song: A man writing about a woman that he's in love with." It's not the first Styx hit to celebrate the wife of a band member: Their first big hit, "Lady," is about Dennis DeYoung's wife Suzanne.

"Lorelei" was the big hit from the fifth Styx album, Equinox. Tommy Shaw wasn't yet with the band - he joined for their next album. As the band racked up hits in the late '70s and early '80s, "Lorelei" got pushed out of their setlists, but it returned in the mid-'90s and was often part of their concerts in the ensuing years. When Dennis DeYoung left the band in 1999, James Young started doing the vocals at their shows.