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The creation and the conduit
Muirsical Conversation with Jon Anderson

Picture
Jon Anderson has one of the most distinct, appealing, memorable and captivating voices in rock and pop and for nearly forty-five years has been a vocal and musical tour de force in progressive music.

The voice of YES for some thirty-five of the band’s first forty years, Anderson was looking forward to celebrating that 40th anniversary in 2008 until he developed a very serious respiratory illness.

Although the band cancelled the 2008 anniversary tour they went on the road later that year with replacement singer
 
Benoît David, rather than wait for Anderson to fully recover (David was then made a permanent member of the band although he too has since been replaced).

However since being dropped by YES and recovering from his illness Jon Anderson has entered one of the most creative and musically prolific periods of his entire career 
– and the noted singer, lyricist, musician and composer took time out from song writing and studio work to take a call from FabricationsHQ to discuss just that...   

Ross Muir: Hi Jon, how's things in California?
 Like I don't know the answer [laughs]

Jon Anderson: 
Yeah, you know what it’s like here, the usual – it’s lovely and warm and sunny.
Although I’m not seeing much of it right now; I’m in the studio writing and working on some songs that I hope to be doing with an orchestra. It's kind of a prolific period. I’ve only come out the studio a couple of times today! 
How’s things in Scotland?

RM: Actually, pretty good. It’s cool, of course [laughs], but lovely, bright sunny days.
Your mention of a "prolific period" leads directly to something I was going to touch on so will open with.
Since recovering from your very serious respiratory illness, some four years ago now...

JA: …yeah, that’s right…

RM: …you’ve entered one of the most creative and musically productive periods of your entire career.
Do you think there is a correlation there? Almost a celebration of life and music after what was obviously a dark and difficult time?

JA: Oh there must be. I think so, yeah. And you know you always hope that what you are working on will be the best you’ve ever done. You always think you are going to do some music that will be a great work in your life, you know?

RM: Absolutely, and I’d like to talk about one or two of those recent works.
As well as your solo shows there have been tours with Rick Wakeman and the release of The Living Tree album back in 2010.
Am I right in saying the shows with Rick were originally to be sets primarily featuring old YES numbers?

JA: Yeah. I think when we decided to tour initially we always said well, you know, we could write a couple of songs for the show, which would give us an idea of who we are, besides singing songs we used to do with the band; or solo ideas and things.
But when we started writing songs together we finished up with enough songs for an album, so we just thought we’d put it out, because we were going to feature those songs on the show as well; it just seemed to sort of work together.
And Rick’s working on some new music now. I’m not sure when he’s going to finish the music but he’s actually working on some new music for a new album.
But writing together gave us a reason to work together as well as enjoying being on stage together.

RM: And that certainly comes across because there is clearly a simpatico between you and Rick, as far as the way you complement each other musically.

JA: Well it’s a natural thing. We like each other, we’re good friends, we’ve worked together at many different times on music over the years; we’re very sympathetic to each other when we record and of course on stage. But you’ve just got to watch out for the jokes…

RM: [laughs]. I recall the comment from a few years ago when Rick would 
mention you during his solo shows, when chatting to the audience – "Jon Anderson is the only man I know who is single-handedly trying to save this planet by living on a totally different one." One of those genuinely affectionate but humorous moments.

JA: That perfect moment! [laughs].

RM: Of course there’s not only The Living Tree studio album; you have since released The Living Tree In Concert Part One. "Part One" tells me there’s another live album in the pipeline...

JA: Yeah, I’ve got Part Two here and I’m threatening to listen to it this month! [laughter]
Everything is a question of timing but I have to listen to it because I know it was a good recording; we actually did Awaken on the last tour, so I’d love to find a good recording of that.
We recorded about five or six shows, so I’ll be able to sift through and find Part Two later this year.

RM: Beyond the work with Rick you’ve released another solo album, Survival and Other Stories.
The Internet and World Wide Web really came into its own for you there because a lot of the album came from your call to other musicians to come to you with ideas and concepts for some of the themes and songs…

JA: Yeah. It’s funny; I’m constantly working on songs with the same people and other people!
My week, when I get up Monday through Friday
 – I try to have weekends off but it’s very hard [chuckles] – I go in the studio, find the music somebody’s just sent me, sing something and send it back.
So it’s just [pauses]… I don’t know what it is, it’s just a really beautiful time to create.
I’m right in the "creation mode" and I don’t know what all the songs mean, per se, or when I’m going to put them out, but if you go on to my website there’s about ten songs there that I haven’t released for people to listen to. But there’s always creation. It’s a very interesting time, especially when you’re writing.
​
I was writing a couple of songs yesterday with an old friend, Jonathan Elias. I’ve sung on his albums over the past ten years. Jonathan puts out an album about once every four years and the last one he put out, Prayer Cycle part two, was with Bono and Sting and many different people.
I sang on it as well and now we’re actually writing a project together!
So it’s funny how the music is coming out very, very well although I’ve still got to find a way to get it to the audiences; but the most important thing is the creation.
RM: Another recent project was the single Open; a four-piece movement and long-form composition.
Open is a wonderful creation and yet that’s something, as you said on your own liner notes, that started with you playing your 19th century classical guitar and then became this lovely twenty-minute piece, with Stefan Podell helping out…

JA: Right. Actually, Stefan is coming over later this week because we started working on another one!
I think it’s one of those things that the idea of making music more in the long-form is the journey that I take in the creation. Because I go on this journey of… construction [laughs].
It's like I’m constructing music in a totally different way than the norm, which is people who really sit down and start writing it out as a score, a music score, or whatever.
And Stefan is a very accomplished orchestrator, with the song and the form and the shape of the music and how it’s going to sit together. And it’s only over a period of time that I realised four or five ideas actually link together very well, so you put them all together.

I go through so many emotions when I’m creating like this I think "I’m going to do this every other year!" because I really want to do this once every other year
– it would be a very good thing over the next ten years if I create all these long-form pieces that actually, somehow, fit together because of my experience.
And it’s interesting; it’s exciting in the way I’m listening to it build and get better and better every month or two because it takes a long time to pull it all together
– I'm going out there and doing solo shows and other things, so when I’m doing the long-form I’m not doing it like "I’ll start today and finish it in a month’s time!"
No, I’m doing it over a long period of time, so it gives me time to reflect and make sure that when I’ve finished it, it works [chuckles], you know, for me.

RM: Sure; it’s one of those things where, as you say, you sit back and reflect and it’s done when it’s done. 
I think Open works remarkably well and you’ve got the clear themes that are important to you – love, spirituality, light, the sun 
– they all come through. It’s a very powerful song; a very emotional song, I feel.

JA:
Thank you. Well, again, I go through times when I’m working on it and I think "oh boy, this is really happening!" and I’m just there in the middle of it, as a very good conduit.
Because the music is coming from somewhere and we’re all sort of connected to where it comes from.
I call it The Divine, you know, or we call it God, or whatever. But it comes from somewhere and I just want to be a good vehicle for getting the music through and making it work.
So I feel very, very confident and happy about what I’m doing.

RM: From the long-form of Open to the short-form and another beautiful number. You recently worked with the Italian composer and musician Marco Sabiu on the song Limitless Lives, which is on his new album.
It was also released as a single earlier this year, but how did that particular collaboration come about?

JA: Well I’ve been working on and off with a friend in Rome called Alessandro De Rosa and we actually released a song together a couple of years ago, I think it was called Music Is God.
That was just a fun song and we got it out there.
And since then we’ve been working on a large-form idea and, in fact, two musicals, but we’re still working on that…

RM: …wow [laughs]…

JA: …yeah, and he called me and said he had a friend, Marco, who would like me to sing on one of his albums. So I said, "well, ask him to send me the music and if I like it, I’ll sing!"
So he sent me the music and he said “I’m calling the track Limitless” and then I thought that’s really, really good for a lyric. So I decided to sing a melody and I wrote a lyric about how limitless we really are, and that seemed to work. And then he said “could I release it as a single?” and I said "no problem!"
RM: Gorgeous song. Staying current, there are a couple of songs you did for the new documentary movie The Highest Pass. You worked on those songs for the soundtrack by Michael Mollura?

JA: That’s correct, yeah. Michael got in touch with me last year through another friend that I was working with in L.A. and he mentioned this movie that he was doing the music for. And I said well, send me the movie and if I like the movie – ha! – I will sing something.
And as it happened I really, really enjoyed the movie. It’s about these Americans that go to India to ride on their motorbikes, up this mountain pass, up into the Himalayas and with a guru.
And it sounds kinda like "oh, ok, it’s a documentary." But it’s very inspiring, the project that they did; it sort of pushed me to write the lyrics for The Highest Pass.

RM: And your song seems to have that perfect simpatico with the movie and its themes.
Just a wonderful combination.

JA: Yeah. Again, you know, you get to that place of creation, with everything that is. You feel whatever comes to you is meant to happen.
Picture
              Jon Anderson has one of the most distinct, appealing and captivating voices in progressive
              rock and melodic pop. "I meditate before I go on stage then open my mouth and this voice
              would come out and I'm thinking 'thank you!' "

          

RM: From current projects to future ones and something you have based on Olias of Sunhillow, your 1976 debut solo album. You have spoken a number of times about the Zamran Son of Olias project, but this seems to be so much more than a sequel to the original album...

JA: Well, it’s such a far reaching idea that it’s very hard to sort of… grasp everything.
I’ve written the storyline three of four times now and I’m still juggling with how to explain it, what’s going on in my head about what Zamran goes through in order to help the tribal beings, that we call light beings, to help to create the structure of the earth and how the lay-lines work.
And it has a lot to do with The Golden Mean, which is always sort of fascinating to me, and the power-spots around the world. In fact one of the stones that I’m very interested in, and always have been, is the Stone of Scone!

RM: I know it very well, as you can imagine [the stone was used in the coronation ceremonies of the early Scottish monarchs].

JA: Yeah; it was stolen from the Scottish people and put underneath the throne of England [the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey] for five hundred years or so. 

RM: You also have the rumour it was actually a fake and the original had been hidden 
– or the story of how we later stole it back and replaced it with a fake. There are also earlier myths and legends about the stone.

JA: I was up in Edinburgh Castle looking at it with my wife and saying "well, it’s a stone [laughs], but I don’t know what else it is!" [laughter].

RM: Another potential project you've mentioned before is working with not just Rick again but Trevor Rabin. Well, if all the stars align [laughs].

JA: Exactly. It’s all about timing. It Happens When It Happens, is my mantra!

RM: [laughs] But if it’s possible it will happen, is what we’re saying?

JA: We’re always in touch. I went to see his son’s band two weeks ago – his son is a drummer in a band called Grouplove 
– 
and I went to see them because they played just five miles away from where I live.
It was great to see the band and it’s a really good band. So we’re in touch, we’ll see what happens.

RM: From potential, future projects to your progressive past...
We cannot, of course, not speak about YES, the band that for their first forty years, up until 2008, you were the focal and vocal point of for around thirty-five of those forty years.
We know the band moved on, we know you’ve also moved on, but looking back and reflecting on the albums, the songs, the tours… happy memories Jon, and proud of what you accomplished as a unit?

JA: Well I am constantly amazed that we survived thirty-five years, when I was with the band, but so many wonderful experiences
 – the music that we created and so many wonderful memories of the concerts.
And I think, as a band, the whole idea of YES was to create new music.
We weren’t sure why we were doing it or what we were doing [laughter] but when we look back it was, and is, very new music
 – albums like Fragile, Close to the Edge, Tales From Topographic Oceans, songs like Gates of Delirium, Awaken…

Then 90125, which was such a departure; we were in a different world but we survived another ten years.
And Talk, a very special album.
Even the last album we did, Magnification, is still a beautiful album.
But like any situation with a group there are times when it’s not really a happy time. If you look at the whole picture, eighty-percent of the time the band was really cooking and really making great music.
And that’s a good percentage, you know, and we were very happy as a band.

The only things that really injured the band, as a group, were when outside influences dominated.
There were times when record companies tried to dominate… the management would dominate… being in a group is a very fragile thing and that’s why I called the album Fragile because that’s how I felt.
The group situation is always a fragile situation and I always hoped that the fans understood that, even though they might be disappointed at times of just the way things went, or the way things go.
I’m a YES fan. I sit and think about the great YES music and think "I’m so happy and thankful that we did that."

RM: You mentioned Gates of Delirium. When I was at secondary school we had a wonderful music teacher.
He primarily taught classical music and choral arrangements but I asked him if he would be happy to discuss or look at the correlation between progressive rock and orchestral and classical music.
I brought in Relayer, did a small dissertation on it and he started to listen to, and allowed me to bring in, records by bands like YES and Emerson Lake & Palmer. 
I have wonderfully fond memories of Relayer for that reason and S
oon, the closing section of Gates of Delirium, is my favourite Jon Anderson/ YES short-form piece.

JA: Excellent, excellent. It’s interesting… I was down in Los Angeles doing the song for Donovan on a TV show and the record man came over and he must have been about, I don’t know, about thirty, thirty-five years old or something.
And he stood next to me and he said "Jon, I want to thank you with all my heart for Tales From Topographic Oceans. It’s one of my all-time favourite pieces of music."
And I just stood there thinking oh my God, the things you go through and then you feel thankful you did it! Because, as you know, that period was very difficult…

RM: Right. And of course there was a split among the music critics and even the fans about Topographic.
I’m on the pro side, I love Topographic Oceans. But I have listened to a lot of the people who say no, it was overly-long, it was meandering, but I don’t get that at all. I just get the strong themes of each piece and the way you expanded those themes from the core songs that you and [guitarist] Steve Howe came up with to make an almost magical eighty-minutes of music.

JA: It was "well, why not?" [laughs].

RM: Fantastic answer [laughs]. Why wouldn’t you, you know? Why wouldn’t you.
Picture
             Relayer (1974) was this writer's first ever review, thanks to a school music class, while the
             double album Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973) is arguably the ultimate musical long-                               form statement in the world of 70's progressive rock.    


RM: You will have heard terms such as "
ethereal" and "angelic" used frequently to describe you vocally, but for me it’s that you are so consistent. How do you look after your voice?

JA: Well, at times I meditate on it. Meditation is a very powerful experience, so you can meditate before you go on stage then just let it happen, rather than… overthink. And the danger is to overthink everything.
The last tour I was on I had flu; I definitely felt I couldn’t sing. But I meditate before I go on stage then open my mouth and this voice would come out and I’m thinking "thank you, thank you, thank you!" 

RM: Such a wonderful gift to have. And we’re talking about modal voice, not falsetto.
Nor have you ever sung falsetto.

JA: My voice is very, very high. I’m an alto-tenor, without falsetto.
It's built and developed over the years to become very [pauses]… it can be dangerously powerful sometimes.

RM: Just to close out before you head back to the studio; my wife is also a huge Jon Anderson fan and loves albums like Toltec, Angels Embrace and the Jon & Vangelis records.
Her favourite song of yours is I Here You Now so, on her behalf, thank you for that song.

JA: Thank you!

RM: Jon, it’s been an absolute pleasure; see you out on the road.

JA: Thank you, I wish you well!

And with that Jon Anderson returned to his studio where, no doubt, he had written another couple of songs by the time this article was published.

And when will all this material he is writing, along with the large collection of unreleased songs he has already completed, become available?

We can only hope the answer to that is…
Soon.
   
Ross Muir
Muirsical Conversation with Jon Anderson
May 2012



Jon Anderson official website: http://www.jonanderson.com/ 

Photo Credits: Jonanderson.com (small photo), amarvudol/ wikipedia public domain (large photo). 

'Soon' (edit) by YES and the other featured audio tracks presented to accompany the above article and to promote the work of the artists. No infringement of copyright is intended.
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