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The following is an excerpt from our interview with Chris Squire and Alan White of Yes. Listen for the rest of our interview in Real Audio (coming soon) Dave: Let’s talk about the new cd and how it all came together, the recording and your thoughts on how this compares to some of your other work. Alan: Well we started in November of '98 and we worked for about six weeks writing together and just basically getting to know the music and Bruce Fairbairn kept coming in and giving us input on what we should be doing. And the whole thing built up and it was a good writing process between everybody in the band and that’s what I think makes some of the better Yes kind of albums, probably, is when we all write together and there’s a good driving force there. And then we started recording in February and within two months we had a new cd which we’re all pretty proud of. Dave: Yeah, actually the reviews I’ve read seem to favor this new album, some saying that’s it’s some of your best work. Alan: Yeah, I mean we all feel great about it. And one of the great things is that we played it live in a rehearsal situation and then played it in a live situation in the studio which gave us, you know, like when we came to rehearse for going on the road. Everything started sounding really good straight away so we were all impressed by the way, in a live situation, it was sounding good. Dave: What are some of your favorite songs from this new album? Chris: Some of my favorite songs are…most of them actually, I like. The ones we play on stage right now… Homeworld and Lightning Strikes and It’ll Be a Good Day and Face to Face, and there’s one other one, what is that one…what is the other one we do? Alan: We did do Nine Voices but sometimes that’s in there… Chris: There’s another that we play, though….I can’t
remember what it is…oh it’s called The Messenger, that’s right,
yeah. Okay, those are my favorites! Dave: From what I understand Bruce passed away during the recording of this album. How did you go about filling in the gaps? Chris: Fortunately, well not really fortunately, but he was good enough to wait until we’d finished playing on the record. It was actually just at the end of the mixing that he suddenly passed away. It was very sudden. We’ll all miss him. His engineer Mike Plotnik, who worked with him for the past ten years, pretty much was his right hand anyway so he pretty much followed the mixing through it I guess in the way Bruce would have done it. It would have been nice for him to have been there, but he wasn’t. But definitely a lot of his influence is there on the album. Especially, as Alan said before, the way he got us to go in the studio one day, routine the song and then would say "Come back tomorrow and we’ll record it." We never recorded anything more than 3 times through and that was enough for him and it kept the freshness and we’d use one of the three tracks or maybe a combination if the tempos matched but he’d certainly help us achieve a good live feeling and, strangely enough, he kept a lot of the keyboard and guitar tracks as well as bass and drums from the ground track. And, you know, it helped to set the album off having a very live, fresh feeling about it. So he certainly contributed a lot to the album and, like I said before, we’ll miss him. |
