Yes--new music: Cut From The Stars

[tonybanksfan]

It’s an interesting song, not great, but there’s some creativity with some expertly played instruments that you don’t hear compared to the drivel that’s being put out by the majority of bands for the last 25 years.

I’d rather listen to stuff like this regardless of what they’re called or who is playing it. In my opinion it’s better than the top 40 crap you hear on the radio regardless of the genre.
I wouldn’t buy it but I’ll listen to it.

[hurricane hugo]

8 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

 

You didn't like anything from Magnification? Those two albums are the only post-Union albums I ever went back to.

The only post-Talk Yes studio stuff I liked was The Ladder and the studio tracks on KTA2. Having said that, the best show I ever saw them do was in July 1998, although that was as much a function of the audience as the band. That crowd was crazy from the drop.

[GRollins]

9 hours ago, TommyRude said:

wowow... lot of controversy here!  I kinda like the song and visuals too!  I mean, who doesn't like cactus mixed with dark skies and stars?

 

 

The back and forth over the members of the band is one thing, but...the overt hostility in some of these posts?

 

There are people who get out of bed in the morning, check their to-do list for the day, and if "Get mad" isn't the top listing, they angrily pen it in above whatever was first.

 

Music, by nature, appeals to the emotions, but the hostility here isn't really about the music, is it? It's just an excuse for some people to vent some of the seething anger that they apparently carry around in their hearts every day, all day. I'm not clear as to why a song about the night sky should provoke people to complain about the lyrics.

 

I do not claim to have a clear, specific, memory of the first time that I heard Roundabout, but I'm pretty sure I noticed that the lyrics are rather abstract. I do remember having conversations with buddies back in the '70s, trying to puzzle out what Jon Anderson's lyrics were all about. Yet now, at the end of the day, I wouldn't change a thing--leave those mountains standing there. I like 'em just where they are, thank you very much. In the same vein, it doesn't strike me as unlikely that a song about the sky might settle in nicely after a few listens.

 

Patience, people...patience...

 

Nothing Yes does--or did--will get airplay around here, vintage or new. The local radio stations have forsaken even Owner Of A Lonely Heart. To the best of my knowledge, there's not a radio station in this entire state that will be playing this song. Ever. Period. As a result, no one will have a chance to get used to it, to learn the lyrics, to sing along sitting at a stoplight, to have it be the last thing they hear at night as they're getting ready for bed...none of the things that we used to take for granted as part of the process of absorbing new music will happen unless we make them happen. Radio used to introduce new music to people. The repetition gave listeners a chance to internalize things that they might not have been instantly drawn to. Now? Radio no longer performs that function. New music--from anyone--faces an uphill battle getting heard. Part of the problem is that there's a lot of trash getting put out and it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Radio used to curate the music that we heard, winnowing out a lot of the forgettable fluff and bringing us new songs that might work. And a lot of it did. There are legions of stories about DJs who championed a song and almost single-handedly made it a hit. Who performs that function now? Nobody, really. Sure, there'll be somebody on YouTube who gets excited, but then who curates that...? There are scores of people trying to push their favorite music and it's just as chaotic as the music scene itself.

 

Again...patience...give the music a chance. Sing the song as you're driving home from work. It might just grow on you.

 

Grey

[Radagast]

13 hours ago, TommyRude said:

 

 

Honestly, I haven't been keeping up with Yes.  I thought when I heard this it was Chris Squire and Jon Anderson putting out a new record.

Even as new-agey as Jon Anderson is, I doubt that he would be able to summon Chris Squire from the afterlife to record a new song.

[AnotherScott]

2 hours ago, GRollins said:

I do remember having conversations with buddies back in the '70s, trying to puzzle out what Jon Anderson's lyrics were all about. Yet now, at the end of the day, I wouldn't change a thing--leave those mountains standing there.

 

Ironically, that lyric was one of Jon Anderson's "real" lyrics (i.e. it was there because of what it meant). I read that he was indeed driving by a lake, and the fog/mist coming off the lake concealed the bottoms of the mountains ahead, so you only saw the top part of the mountains, appearing not to be anchored to the ground, but just floating. They indeed just "came out of the sky" and, unlike most earthly things you see above you that are not anchored to the ground, they just stood there, suspended, unmoving. So that did describe what it was he was seeing in this trip.

 

The reason I said that it was an ironic lyric to mention here is that Anderson has also admitted that some of his lyrics have no literal meaning at all. He thinks of his voice as a musical instrument, and sometimes a lyric is the way it is because he just likes the flow of the sounds, and there is no deeper meaning than that.

 

2 hours ago, GRollins said:

Radio used to curate the music that we heard, winnowing out a lot of the forgettable fluff and bringing us new songs that might work. And a lot of it did. There are legions of stories about DJs who championed a song and almost single-handedly made it a hit. Who performs that function now? Nobody, really. Sure, there'll be somebody on YouTube who gets excited, but then who curates that...? There are scores of people trying to push their favorite music and it's just as chaotic as the music scene itself.

 

Interesting point. But services like Spotify basically serve that purpose now. Primarily, it's a personalized curation. It learns what you like, and then will play/suggest songs you may have never heard before, which the algorithm says you may like. In some ways it's better than the old method, in that the unknown music it plays is personalized to your tastes. But if that's all you permit, you'll lose the possible "surprise" of being able to find yourself liking a song of some other genre that you might not have expected to appeal to you, since unlike some radio, instead of exposing you to a bit of everything, it exposes you to things it thinks you will like based on what you already like. But Spotify also has "current hits" playlists which I think play the most popular songs across genres, so if you choose that, you're probably getting close to what radio stations would have played back in the day. But instead of being based on what bigwigs decide (or get paid) to play, it's based on what lots of other people have said they liked.

[KuruPrionz]

5 hours ago, GRollins said:

 

The back and forth over the members of the band is one thing, but...the overt hostility in some of these posts?

 

There are people who get out of bed in the morning, check their to-do list for the day, and if "Get mad" isn't the top listing, they angrily pen it in above whatever was first.

 

Music, by nature, appeals to the emotions, but the hostility here isn't really about the music, is it? It's just an excuse for some people to vent some of the seething anger that they apparently carry around in their hearts every day, all day. I'm not clear as to why a song about the night sky should provoke people to complain about the lyrics.

 

I do not claim to have a clear, specific, memory of the first time that I heard Roundabout, but I'm pretty sure I noticed that the lyrics are rather abstract. I do remember having conversations with buddies back in the '70s, trying to puzzle out what Jon Anderson's lyrics were all about. Yet now, at the end of the day, I wouldn't change a thing--leave those mountains standing there. I like 'em just where they are, thank you very much. In the same vein, it doesn't strike me as unlikely that a song about the sky might settle in nicely after a few listens.

 

Patience, people...patience...

 

Nothing Yes does--or did--will get airplay around here, vintage or new. The local radio stations have forsaken even Owner Of A Lonely Heart. To the best of my knowledge, there's not a radio station in this entire state that will be playing this song. Ever. Period. As a result, no one will have a chance to get used to it, to learn the lyrics, to sing along sitting at a stoplight, to have it be the last thing they hear at night as they're getting ready for bed...none of the things that we used to take for granted as part of the process of absorbing new music will happen unless we make them happen. Radio used to introduce new music to people. The repetition gave listeners a chance to internalize things that they might not have been instantly drawn to. Now? Radio no longer performs that function. New music--from anyone--faces an uphill battle getting heard. Part of the problem is that there's a lot of trash getting put out and it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Radio used to curate the music that we heard, winnowing out a lot of the forgettable fluff and bringing us new songs that might work. And a lot of it did. There are legions of stories about DJs who championed a song and almost single-handedly made it a hit. Who performs that function now? Nobody, really. Sure, there'll be somebody on YouTube who gets excited, but then who curates that...? There are scores of people trying to push their favorite music and it's just as chaotic as the music scene itself.

 

Again...patience...give the music a chance. Sing the song as you're driving home from work. It might just grow on you.

 

Grey

Sir Grey, you have to allow that we are all different and have different tastes in pretty much everything. 

 

Some folks love to smoke tobacco, I hate that smell. Some people hate sushi, I love it. Some humans will actually consume Jello with Miracle Whip, I won't touch it etc., etc..

 

I saw Yes live twice. I went the second time even though the sound of Jon Anderson's voice makes me cringe (it just does, I own it).

Why? Because Steve Howe was one of my favorite guitarists by far, Chris Squire was his own monster on the bass, like nobody else, Rick Wakeman was a great keyboardist and Alan White a monster drummer. I enjoyed both shows immensely despite the annoying vocals and hippy-trippy lyrics (and yes, I was a hippy too but you can only take so much...).

I owned a couple of Yes albums and played them quite a bit at one point in my life. I even jammed along with them on guitar, just seeing what I could do in that context. 

 

So gimme a break! You post on an open forum and expect everybody to bow down to the wonder of it all? 

I gave them more than a fair chance to be enjoyed, on to the next... 😇

 

[EscapeRocks]

My, we are a cranky bunch 

 

 

[mate stubb]

30 minutes ago, KuruPrionz said:

Some humans will actually consume Jello with Miracle Whip

 

 

I sincerely hope you were joking about this. I just lost my lunch appetite. 

[wjwilcox]

5 hours ago, mate stubb said:

 

I sincerely hope you were joking about this. I just lost my lunch appetite. 

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/468655904946026113/

[TommyRude]

[jazzpiano88]

On 3/11/2023 at 3:38 AM, GRollins said:

The Steve Howe faction of Yes has released a new album. This is the first single.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdEF-vMO8vc

 

The music I heard from the last album didn't do much for me. I didn't dislike it, but it just didn't gel for me. This seems more promising.

 

Grey

 

 I like the track.  Embodies everything I remember about the band.  

[jazzpiano88]

8 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

I saw Yes live twice. I went the second time even though the sound of Jon Anderson's voice makes me cringe (it just does, I own it).

 

Kuru,

I think you are the one with the problem here.  You can't deal vocalists in this range. Remember,  "Geddy (Lee) sounds like a tortured animal, or he would if he wasn't singing such infantile lyrics that makes him sound like a tortured imbecile".

 

Clearly you need some introspection to deal with the hyperbolic reactions to vocalists you can't handle.

 

I mean that with all due respect and am willing to hear your contrary arguments.

 

 

[Synthaholic]

On 3/11/2023 at 8:12 PM, GRollins said:

I have no idea who I'd nominate for Squire's position.

Pino Palladino 

[Synthaholic]

On 3/11/2023 at 8:12 PM, GRollins said:

I always preferred him to Alan White.

I don't know who replaced Alan White after he passed away last year, but I think that Gary Husband would be an excellent choice.

[Piktor]

13 hours ago, GRollins said:

 

Music, by nature, appeals to the emotions, but the hostility here isn't really about the music, is it? It's just an excuse for some people to vent some of the seething anger that they apparently carry around in their hearts every day, all day. I'm not clear as to why a song about the night sky should provoke people to complain about the lyrics.

I try to save most of my “seething anger” for provincial and federal politics. 😊 I cannot think of any music that actually evokes that kind of response in me. I don’t spend the day looking for an argument. Here, I actually think that the night sky and and the feelings that a sky full of stars evokes is a pretty good idea for a lyric. While I am certainly not an expert in such matters, I just think that this poetry feels lumpy and underdeveloped. Admittedly, like many people, I have spent too many years happily ignoring lyrics. (Not any more.) If this was my video, I would not have presented the lyrics in written form. I might have enjoyed the song more if I could ignore them.

 

 

 

13 hours ago, GRollins said:

 

[D. Gauss]

IMO, Yes has been corporate, "how do we hold onto the large houses we all bought" rock since '79 or so.  Revolving door members for a band in name only who've run out of decent ideas. On the other hand, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard? Not always my cup of tea, as they change styles like most people change socks, but they are crazy inventive in a way that bands like Yes used to be. YMMV, and probably does. 

[KuruPrionz]

6 minutes ago, JazzPiano88 said:

 

Kuru,

I think you are the one with the problem here.  You can't deal vocalists in this range. Remember,  "Geddy (Lee) sounds like a tortured animal, or he would if he wasn't singing such infantile lyrics that makes him sound like a tortured imbecile".

 

Clearly you need some introspection to deal with the hyperbolic reactions to vocalists you can't handle.

 

I mean that with all due respect and am willing to hear your contrary arguments.

 

 

Right, there is ONLY ONE PROBLEM and that would be me. Got it. 🥰

So, do you LOVE the sound of EVERYBODY'S singing? And therefore I must "have a problem"? 😂

 

That must be wonderful. Truly. I'm not here to cast judgement on what others like or do not like. I consider some folks to be much luckier that I am since they can enjoy some music that I don't care for. It doesn't follow that I can't express an honest opinion. I see people on forums expressing honest opinions all the time (like you just did). 

 

I don't love some people's singing, I guess that makes me wrong and bad? 

Amazing to me that you also chose Geddy Lee. I dislike Jon Anderson's vocal sound far less than I dislike Geddy Lee's. 

Lyrics are another matter entirely but again simply personal taste. If somebody likes lyrics and somebody else does not, that doesn't imply much of anything about either person, at least not in my opinion. Hyperbolic? You're cracking me up! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

 

What about food? Colors? Poetry? Classical music? For any sort of human activity, there are differing opinions. There will ALWAYS be differing opinions.

It's my opinion that your opinion of my opinion is based on your own opinion since you truly don't know much of anything about me whatsoever. I'm OK with that, hopefully you feel better now. 

 

Does that help any? No? So what? 😇

[Synthaholic]

On 3/11/2023 at 10:51 PM, bill5 said:

I don't question the legalities or the marketing strategy, esp for the relatively unknown guys. It's just lame IMO. As vital to Yes as Steve Howe is/was, Yes without at least some of the rest, most obviously Jon Anderson? Puh-leez. They can call it whatever they want, but that aint Yes. Really I just hate when this happens. I recall seeing Little River Band some years back...none of the original members, and yes, it was a total ripoff, as any famous band is which plays this game. I can see quite a few fans going to a "Yes" concert now without realizing what was going on and going wth and feeling ripped off (of course you could say they should have known better ahead of time). Can you see Ringo Starr rebooting the Beatles without McCartney (or even with him really)? The Rolling Stones without Jagger? I could go on. Old timers want to keep going, fine, but stop pretending they're something they aren't.

 

/soapbox  

Kansas has gotten this way, also. Phil Ehart and Rich Williams are the only originals left. And while Ehart has always been really underrated when people talk about the great drummers in the rock era, Kansas without Steve Walsh and Robbie Steinhart just ain't Kansas. Kerry Livgren is less missed as an on-stage presence, and they aren't really writing new material of note, or even trying to.

[Radagast]

2 hours ago, Synthaholic said:

 Kerry Livgren is less missed as an on-stage presence, and they aren't really writing new material of note, or even trying to.

Considering Kerry Livgren helped compose much of Kansas’ music and played guitar and keyboards, I’d say his absence is rather striking.

[Synthaholic]

3 hours ago, Radagast said:

Considering Kerry Livgren helped compose much of Kansas’ music and played guitar and keyboards, I’d say his absence is rather striking.

As a songwriter, yes. But as I said, they're not writing songs anymore to stay relevant on the charts. The parts he played on stage can be played by other competent musicians and have been through the different incarnations. Steve Morse certainly could play any of Livgren's guitar parts. Probably even backwards.

[GRollins]

17 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

 

Ironically, that lyric was one of Jon Anderson's "real" lyrics (i.e. it was there because of what it meant). I read that he was indeed driving by a lake, and the fog/mist coming off the lake concealed the bottoms of the mountains ahead, so you only saw the top part of the mountains, appearing not to be anchored to the ground, but just floating. They indeed just "came out of the sky" and, unlike most earthly things you see above you that are not anchored to the ground, they just stood there, suspended, unmoving. So that did describe what it was he was seeing in this trip.

 

The reason I said that it was an ironic lyric to mention here is that Anderson has also admitted that some of his lyrics have no literal meaning at all. He thinks of his voice as a musical instrument, and sometimes a lyric is the way it is because he just likes the flow of the sounds, and there is no deeper meaning than that.

 

 

Interesting point. But services like Spotify basically serve that purpose now. Primarily, it's a personalized curation. It learns what you like, and then will play/suggest songs you may have never heard before, which the algorithm says you may like. In some ways it's better than the old method, in that the unknown music it plays is personalized to your tastes. But if that's all you permit, you'll lose the possible "surprise" of being able to find yourself liking a song of some other genre that you might not have expected to appeal to you, since unlike some radio, instead of exposing you to a bit of everything, it exposes you to things it thinks you will like based on what you already like. But Spotify also has "current hits" playlists which I think play the most popular songs across genres, so if you choose that, you're probably getting close to what radio stations would have played back in the day. But instead of being based on what bigwigs decide (or get paid) to play, it's based on what lots of other people have said they liked.

 

Yeah, I've seen the quotes from Anderson about both Roundabout and him using words as a musical instrument. In the case of Roundabout, that is of absolutely no help to the average listener because if Anderson isn't there to tell them what he meant (in the quote I saw, I believe one of the other band members was with him at the time...Squire?), then the lyrics certainly still sound pretty random. And as for me, I don't really mind words being chosen for their sound. It may not always necessarily make logical sense, but there are popular songs that have lyrics that I think are drivel. I would just as soon listen to random words as words that "make sense" but are painfully, childishly simplistic. To me, that sort of lyric writing is not really all that different from random words--they wrote something that would fit the way the music was going, rather than setting out to make a profound statement.

 

The problem with music streaming services is the same as with news feeds, you run the risk of creating an echo chamber. The algorithms used to drop in surprises aren't very good. Right now, for instance, I'm locked in a running battle with FB's "Suggested for you" thing because it is absolutely obsessed with pushing ABBA at me! WTF? And I can't get the stupid thing to let up. No matter how many times I downcheck ABBA, it keeps coming back. Oi! Will they eventually get an AI that can do a reasonable job? Yeah, probably. Hopefully. But we're not there yet.

 

I think we lost something when all the radio stations got bought up by national mega-corporations. Top-down control of play lists on a national level did the same thing to radio that fast food chains did--you go to any town in America and you see McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, et. al. and it's getting damned near impossible to find food that deviates from that mold. I miss radio stations that were run by people instead of committees looking at Power Point presentations of surveys with means and averages and standard deviations. I want Calvin C., dammit! He was the guy on late nights at the radio station in Charlotte who always sounded like he was stoned out of his gourd (usually was, but he talked that way all the time, regardless). You never knew what he was going to play, but it was usually good, and he had, you know...personality...another thing that's gone missing and won't be coming back. Even the DJs sound the same these days, at least around here.

 

KuruPrionz,

Good grief, man...who licked the red off your candy?

 

I haven't asked anyone to 'bow down to the wonder of it all.' I tend to be a literal kind of guy. When I said in the original post that I thought that the song was promising, that's what I meant. I didn't go gaga over it right off the bat, but there's enough there that I think I'll listen to it some more and see if it grows on me. A lot of the songs that I regard as solid work now were not "oh my gawd, where's this song been all my life?" hits the first time I heard them. Kashmir, I think was instantaneous. Went straight into my DNA. A lot of Miles Davis, on the other hand, took time to soak in. Wouldn't trade it for anything now, but it wasn't all one-listen-and-done for me. Some, yes. Other things, no.

 

I will be interested to hear what the rest of the album sounds like. After all, if I had heard We Have Heaven first off of Fragile, I would never have expected Heart Of The Sunrise, and I doubt anyone else would have made that prediction, either.

 

Like I said earlier, some people just want to be mad. Any excuse will do.

 

Grey

[mcgoo]

I listened to "Cut from the Stars" last night. Then I listened to "The Quest". I had the same impression of both. Good stuff... enjoyed it, BUT.... it didn't excite me as a new and fresh sounding Yes, exploring new territory. While I remain a huge fan of Jon Anderson's voice & lyric writing, I also liked Trevor Horn & loved Drama when it came out. To me, that was the band embracing what he & Downs brought to the table and exploring new territory. I also loved (at least the beginning of) the Rabin era for the same reason. And I LOVED the AWBH offerings. But the latest stuff kinda reminds me of Starcastle.... as in, trying desperately to be the Yes of yesteryear. And no one in my view, not even a group of folks with the same band name, can beat the classic Yes at their own game. YMMV.

[D. Gauss]

12 minutes ago, mcgoo said:

 kinda reminds me of Starcastle.... as in, trying desperately to be the Yes of yesteryear.  

 

Ha! Starcastle played my high school back in the 70's.

[mcgoo]

1 hour ago, D. Gauss said:

 

Ha! Starcastle played my high school back in the 70's.

 

Fun! Actually, in some ways my comment about them wasn't entirely fair... I quite liked them back in the day! 

[AnotherScott]

5 hours ago, GRollins said:

Yeah, I've seen the quotes from Anderson about both Roundabout and him using words as a musical instrument. In the case of Roundabout, that is of absolutely no help to the average listener because if Anderson isn't there to tell them what he meant (in the quote I saw, I believe one of the other band members was with him at the time...Squire?), then the lyrics certainly still sound pretty random.

 

It's kind of like the difference between a highly realistic painting of a fruit bowl, and an abstract one, where maybe even few people would recognize the latter as a fruit bowl unless told so by the artist...  yet it could still be art, despite it missing an obvious "literal" meaning (even though it may have had one for the artist).

[KuruPrionz]

7 hours ago, GRollins said:

Like I said earlier, some people just want to be mad. Any excuse will do.

 

Grey

Hi Grey, I'm not mad in the slightest. In fact, I think it's funny. 😇

In the keeping it real dept., you have to admit that typing on a forum is probably one of the most cumbersome ways to communicate. 

Things can only be taken (and misunderstood) literally. We get no cues from vocal or facial expression, hand gestures etc.. 

 

I was raised in a family environment where people said what they thought, I'm not one to sugar-coat things. So yeah, I can be blunt. 

[TommyRude]

hey these guys sound pretty damn good!

 

[harmonizer]

Sometimes I enjoy a song's lyrics even if they don't seem to make any sense, and I think such lyrics can be good art.

To me a lot of the lyrics in those first 3 Yes albums fall in that category.

I'm a big Steely Dan fan too, and some of my favorite Steely Dan songs include lyrics that don't make sense without it seeming to detract from the song. There are also some songs on each of the first 5 Steely Dan albums that I have no interest in listening to anymore.

Sometimes this kind of thing works artistically and sometimes it doesn't.

 

[GRollins]

I hadn't even thought about Steely Dan, but they're an excellent example of lyrics that don't necessarily track logically. Or maybe we just need the lyrics explained to us. Or maybe not. Just let it be and enjoy the music.

 

I was into Starcastle back in the day. Then I rather suddenly fell out of love with them--don't really know why. Saw them live with Boston and they were...uh...not inspirational, shall we say, but I still liked the albums for a while after that, so it wasn't the lackluster concert.

 

Yes has had many eras. Each era attracted its share of new fans who then grew possessive of "their" edition of Yes. I just happen to have been around for the first era and to this day feel that it was the best (what? you're surprised?). I would dearly love to hear what Rick Wakeman would have done with this latest batch of music. With all due respect to Geoff Downes's supporters, he's no Wakeman.

 

Judging solely from the one tune available at this time, I'm thinking that there's a...what word do I want to use?...growth, maybe?...in the music since Quest that I find encouraging. If the (hypothetical, I could easily be wrong if the rest of this album turns out to be comprised of duds) trend continues, the next album or the one after could be quite interesting indeed.

 

Grey

[TommyRude]

So just by coincidence, next week I'll be vacationing a few days in and around Moab Utah, and several of the great places we'll be visiting are International Dark Sky Parks, cool!  Arches National Park for one.  I'll be bringing my binocs, and I think I'll play Cut From the Stars while I'm staring at the sky, should be cool.