Nearly 50 years after it first hit the airwaves, “Renegade” by Styx is still one of those songs you might hear blasting from someone’s open car windows on the first warm day of the season. Why? Well, apart from the fact that it’s a banger, to use the modern parlance, the lyrics speak to everyone’s secret (or not so secret) outlaw impulses.
From the super popular 1978 album Pieces of Eight, “Renegade” was released as a single in 1979 and has remained a pop culture staple ever since. Not only is it still on the radio all the time, but the Pittsburgh Steelers used “Renegade” as their defensive rally song for years, plus it’s shown up in a bunch of movies and TV shows (like Freaks and Geeks and Billy Madison).
Written by guitarist Tommy Shaw, the song tells the story of a man on the run from the law with a “high price” on his head: “The jig is up, the news is out / They finally found me / The renegade who had it made / Retrieved for a bounty / Nevermore to go astray / This’ll be the end today of the wanted man”
It’s no surprise that Ultimate Classic Rock included “Renegade” on its list of the “Top 100 Classic Rock Songs” of all time, ranking it #95. It was a big hit when it came out in ’79, too, peaking at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100.
As Shaw told the outlet in 2024, the song might have accidentally been based on another big hit: “Band on the Run” by Wings.
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“I wrote the basic parts of it on piano,” Shaw explained. “I’m not a piano player, but in my living room, I had a reel-to-reel four-channel tape recorder. I’d been listening to Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project. I had to learn that with my ham-fisted guitar hands. But I finally got it and I recorded it on one track. Then, I used the other tracks for three vocal parts. I wrote the words quickly and then recorded it like that. I listened back to it and it was like, ‘I think this is good!'”
“I played it for the band and then they started coming up with the arrangements of it,” he continued. “’Let’s speed it up. Let’s not make it this dirge thing that you’re playing. Let’s rock it up and then let’s put some high Styx vocals in the big parts.’ I told Alan Parsons that. ‘I feel like I need to confess to you that I kind of ripped off ‘Renegade’ from one of your songs.’ He said, ‘Paul McCartney says I ripped it off from him.'”
Either way, clearly songs about being on the run are what the people want to hear.
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