{"id":11956,"date":"2016-12-21T05:30:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T10:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=11956"},"modified":"2016-11-29T10:38:04","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T15:38:04","slug":"11956","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/21\/11956\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Anderson and ARW: Yes Indeed"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, I conducted separate interviews with Rick Wakeman<\/b> and Jon Anderson<\/b>. Both conversations centered around the then-upcoming (and now current) ARW tour, featuring three ex-Yes musicians: Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin<\/b>, and Rick Wakeman. I wrote several printed features based on those interviews; in addition to those, I’ve published the transcripts of my Rick Wakeman chat, split into specific topics. My conversation with Jon Anderson had two parts: one covering his recent collaborative album with Reine Stolt<\/b><\/a>, and the other focusing on ARW. Here’s the latter part. Note that the conversation took place well before the tour began. \u2013 BK<\/i><\/p>\n

Bill Kopp<\/b>: Tell me about the events leading up to you getting together with Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jon Anderson<\/b>: Basically, I toured with Rick a couple of a years ago on the East Coast and then I did an English tour with him six months. We did an album called The Living Tree<\/i>, together, like a duo. And we also spoke about Trevor. Trevor has been working on film scores for the last 15 years and I just happened to go and see him working a couple of times last year, the year before. So I was in touch with Trevor just as a friend and I was like \u2026 I was digging what he was doing, so I was enjoying his creative juices flowing. We always talked about, \u201cWell, one day it would be really cool if we get together.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then December last year Rick\u2019s manager \u2013 whom I have known for years \u2013 got in touch and said \u201cWhy don\u2019t you guys get together?\u201d And so six months later we\u2019re now going to start rehearsing next month. And we\u2019ll be doing a show by October, November, then we\u2019ll go to Europe and the Far East. So we\u2019re already planning on performing a tour. It\u2019s going to be exciting on many levels.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: There\u2019s a lot of overlap in your respective catalogs and clearly anyone of you can and many, many, many times has filled an evening with just the music of one of you and even then, barely even scratched the surface of that. So how are you selecting the music for this tour?<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: Again, it is just a question of writing ideas down. I wrote them down last week and sent them to Rick and Trevor. They both liked the ideas but it\u2019s always just a basic sketch of songs I\u2019d like to sing. I\u2019d like to hear Trevor do one of his pieces of music from a movie, and I\u2019d like to hear Rick do some of the new compositions and we\u2019re actually working on one at the moment. So, it\u2019s one of those things until we start rehearsing we won\u2019t really know.<\/p>\n

\"jon_anderson\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019re going to be doing some great Yes classics, of course. That\u2019s part of who we are; we\u2019re not doing anything than retaining our musical history and putting it out there as show, a tour. We\u2019re not really thinking of releasing any music because music is, these days \u2026 I\u2019m thinking people are not going to release albums soon. I think they’re just going to to make music and tour with new music and that is going to be the new form of projecting your work through the internet, through iTunes.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: In January you mentioned on Facebook that the three of you having been doing some writing together, some new material. Can you tell me anything about that?<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: I\u2019ve got all the lyrics in front of me. I\u2019ve got about five or six songs here. We\u2019ll use maybe two or three of them this time \u2018round. Very, very powerful rock \u2026 not quite rock \u2026 it\u2019s kind<\/i> of rock \u2026 it\u2019s hard to explain what kind of music it is!<\/p>\n

Trevor\u2019s been writing this really powerful stuff, musically speaking. And at the same time some very surreal and very sad music about certain events that happened around us that we\u2019re going through. A lot of emotion was involved in writing these.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: When I spoke to Rick earlier this week, and he had mentioned the idea for some of the Yes classics that you might perform that you might actually approach them a little bit differently musically: different arrangements. Obviously not hundreds of miles away from the originals, but not just reproducing them exactly the way that people are used to hearing them.<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: It doesn\u2019t seem logical to carbon copy the songs anymore, because musically it\u2019s forty years later, fifty years later in some cases. So you want to change sounds, the arrangement slightly. People love the songs.<\/p>\n

I just did a tour with Jean-Luc Ponty<\/b><\/a> and I was getting standing ovations to \u201cLong Distance Runaround\u201d and it was like an Indian raga. And the audience went bananas; they loved it. So the song always comes through in the end, no matter how you musically sort of surround it. I realized from that tour that if you are working with really wonderful musicians, and you put over a song in its 21 century version of Yes, if you like, it won\u2019t be that different \u2026 but it will sound different and it will feel emotionally the same.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: For me, one of the qualities of a really, really good song is that it is malleable: you can do different things with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: I agree. I agree. I mean, happily. Some bands are just performing what they did forty years ago and I\u2019m thinking, \u201cWell, that\u2019s ok, but it\u2019s not what I want to do.\u201d It\u2019s just not the way I think musically, like, I\u2019m always into the adventure of music. But whichever way, I\u2019ll always put on the best show I can.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: I think that quality is something that fans of your work appreciate. They\u2019re not the sort of fans that want to hear the same thing, the same way, over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: True.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: Both you and Rick, at very times in recent years, have faced some health problems. This upcoming tour is pretty ambitious. I\u2019m sure that the nature of touring for you is certainly different than it would have been in the 70s. Do you look forward to the rigors and demands of touring?<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: It\u2019s like anything, life is what it is. It\u2019s how you approach it. It\u2019s exhausting but it\u2019s something that you set yourselves up to do. It\u2019s one of those things: you do it and you make it work.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: And clearly no one is making you do this, so it\u2019s something that you want to do \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: Life is a challenge. I don\u2019t want to stop doing challenges and I\u2019ll be 103 and I\u2019ll stop then.<\/p>\n

BK<\/b>: I am very much looking forward to seeing one of the tour dates. I\u2019ll see you when you are in Durham, North Carolina. I haven\u2019t seen you since the 90125<\/i> tour; it’s been a long time.<\/span><\/p>\n

JA<\/b>: You\u2019ll have a great time. We\u2019re going to do songs from 90125, Talk<\/i> and some classic Yes stuff and we\u2019re going to mingle with some new song ideas. It\u2019ll be quite a beautiful event for me. I think everyone will enjoy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, I conducted separate interviews with Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson. Both conversations centered around the then-upcoming (and now current) ARW tour, featuring three ex-Yes musicians: Jon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11957,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2925,2924,2551,2413],"class_list":["post-11956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anderson-rabin-wakeman","tag-arw","tag-jon-anderson","tag-yes","cat-1-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11956"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11961,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11956\/revisions\/11961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}