All Connected: Yes Through the Years (Part 1 of 2)

The history of Yes is lengthy and byzantine. Since the progressive rock avatars began in London in 1968, more than 20 musicians have passed through its ranks. Through those changes, the successive and ever-shifting lineups of Yes have turned out a dazzling array of classic albums, earning worldwide acclaim, a Grammy Award and (in 2017) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Today – nearly 60 years after the group’s start – guitarist Steve Howe leads the current lineup. Howe joined Yes in 1970, in time for the breakthrough release The Yes Album. Other longtime members in the current group include keyboardist Geoff Downes (first appearing on 1980’s Drama), multi-instrumentalist Billy Sherwood (on board starting in 1991) and drummer Jay Schellen (2016 onward). Vocalist Jon Davison is the band’s fourth lead singer, joining in 2012 and following on from founding singer Jon Anderson, Trevor Horn and Benoît David.

Ahead of Yes’ just-wrapped tour, Davison spoke with me about his background, his role in Yes, and the band’s present and future.

You were born a month before the release of The Yes Album in 1971. Tell me about when you first discovered the music of Yes and what kind of an impression it made on you.

Well, it was many years later, obviously! You hear a lot of stories of Yes fans saying, “My older brothers were way ahead of me, and they turned me on to all this great music.” I had an older brother, but he wasn’t that much older, so we sort of shared the same musical interests.

At that time, Bon Jovi was at the top of the charts. Apart from “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” nobody listened to Yes! So I just discovered them from what was most popular at the time in high school: 90125 [from 1983] and the ‘80s Trevor Rabin sound. Then I went back from there, doing my own research. I was doing my own nerdy thing, getting into old Genesis and Yes all on my own. I was probably about 17 when I first heard [1971’s] Fragile.

In your work prior to Yes, you played guitar and bass. How do you think that those endeavors helped prepare you for what you are now doing in Yes?

That’s a good question. Being a bass player, I appreciated bassists that had a voicing in the music rather than just playing root notes and purely supportive roles. They played around and they had a strong presence. I think that as a bass player, I could understand that language from the likes of Geddy Lee and Chris Squire. So that was my opening into progressive rock, the first thing that I could understand and relate to.

You came into the group fairly quickly, replacing Benoît David. From the beginning, was it understood that you were going to be a creative collaborator involved with songwriting, or was it at first, “We just need you to come in and be our vocalist”?

I think Chris was always keen on trying to understand the full picture of what an artist can do, going back to Trevor Horn and Drama [1980].  He reinvented Yes when Jon Anderson left, and he took a lot of pride in that. And then again with Trevor Rabin, and then to some extent with Billy Sherwood in the [1997] Open Your Eyes period. So when I came in, there was obviously a very strong focus on “Let’s get the set up and running; can you do it?” But also [a focus on] what’s going on in the periphery. Within the first six months of me being in the band, Chris invited me out to his house near Phoenix, and we were already writing music. He wanted to understand me as an artist, which I really appreciated.

Did you find that as you were collaborating on writing that you had to bend your style at all to make it work in the Yes aesthetic?

I hadn’t done a lot of songwriting, to be honest with you. Being a bass player, I approached composition from that angle. In Sky Cries Mary, my Seattle band of the ‘90s, we all wrote equally and just wrote as we played; everything was kind of live, essentially. So from an instrumentalist point of view, I was a really band-oriented musician.

But I hadn’t really started songwriting seriously as a vocalist until I was working with Glass Hammer. That was a self-discovery period for me, and it sort of paved the way for me to get into Yes a few years later. My only vocal style that I had developed up to that time was sort of the Jon Anderson style, which worked perfectly in Glass Hammer. And obviously that worked quite well in Yes.

From the times that I’ve seen the band, for the audience as a whole, there’s a list of songs that they simply must hear. How does that fact figure into the band’s mindset when it comes to writing new material? Do you find yourselves thinking, “How many new songs should we bother writing?” Because as good as they are, people want to hear “Starship Trooper.”

When we come to songwriting, we let the music write itself. There’s always a common thread that links us to the past of Yes, especially having a legacy member like Steve [Howe] so involved in the compositions. Ultimately, I think it’s about what we want to say lyrically and what we feel musically. That can be very different from traditional Yes, and I think that’s a healthy thing. Because whenever you try to recapture the past, you’re just imitating. So [instead] we think, “Let’s just move forward and create music that’s reflective of who we are today.”

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