Jon Anderson does not make ordinary music. He never has. These are the seven albums that explain why the records that filled his imagination, shaped his voice, and pointed yes toward territory nobody else had thought to explore. Seven, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Begin [music] with the obvious, then go deeper. Every musician of Jon Anderson’s generation was changed by the Beatles. That is not a controversial statement, it is simply the weather of the era. But what Sgt. Pepper did
specifically, and what [music] Anderson absorbed specifically, was something more precise than general inspiration. This was the album that proved a rock band could build a complete world inside a single record. Not just songs, not just a sequence of tracks, a world with its own atmosphere, its own internal logic, its own beginning and end. >> What my lover brings she brings [singing] to me. Yes, in their earliest days, performed Beatles covers on stage. That was not an imitation, it was education. Anderson
and Chris Squire used those songs as a shared language, a way of establishing what they believed music could be before they had developed the vocabulary to say it themselves. The ambition of Sgt. Pepper sat directly behind the ambition of Close to the Edge, of Tales from Topographic Oceans, of every Yes record that reached for something larger than the format seemed to allow. The production is the other lesson. George Martin and the band treated the studio as a compositional instrument, layering
sounds and textures with a freedom that had never been applied to popular music at that scale. Anderson carried that permission directly into the Yes sound. The idea that nothing was off-limits, that orchestration and rock and mysticism could share the same space without apology. To see The Beatles and uh it changed my life. Just wanted to be a Beatle from then on, you know. Sgt. Pepper did not just change what Anderson listened to, [music] it changed what he believed he was allowed to attempt. Six, Bridge over
Troubled Water. [music] Two voices, that is where it starts. Jon Anderson has spoken many times about the bond he formed with Chris Squire when they first met at the Marquee Club in 1968. Two musicians from different worlds, sizing each other up, discovering common ground. And the common ground was this, they both loved Simon and Garfunkel. >> [music] >> They both understood what two voices in perfect harmony could do to a room, to a listener, to the inside of a person’s chest. Bridge over Troubled Water was
the summit of everything Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had been building across six years of recording together. The title [music] track alone, Garfunkel’s voice rising over Larry Knechtel’s piano, building to a final verse that feels like it is carrying the weight of every difficult thing anyone has ever been through, is one of the great vocal performances in popular music. Anderson heard it and understood it not as a pop record, but as a demonstration of what the human voice could achieve. Two
singers, actually. >> [music] >> And the other singer went to be a uh air dresser. When placed inside the right arrangement with the right [music] intention, the harmonic sophistication running through the album, the layered vocals, the orchestral arrangements, the way melody and lyric are treated as equally weighted compositional elements, flows directly into Anderson’s approach to writing for Yes. The vocal stacking on Roundabout, on And You and I, on the entire architecture of Fragile, carries
Simon and Garfunkel’s DNA inside it. Yes, even recorded America as a tribute. That choice was not casual. It was Anderson acknowledging in the clearest possible terms where a significant part of his musical identity had come from. Five, Buffalo Springfield Again. Some records arrive quietly and detonate slowly. Jon Anderson was absorbing everything the late ’60s had to offer, the British Invasion, the emerging California sound, [music] the first stirrings of what would become progressive But Buffalo Springfield
Again caught him in a specific way. This [music] was not a band following a trend. This was a band operating at the intersection of folk, rock, country, [music] and psychedelia with a compositional sophistication that most of their contemporaries had not yet imagined. Stephen Stills and Neil Young writing on the same album, pulling in opposite directions, and somehow producing something coherent. That creative tension is audible in every track. Stills brought structure and groove. Young brought strangeness and emotional
rawness. Together, they produced a record that felt like it was constantly threatening to fall apart and somehow never did. >> [music] >> For Anderson, whose own creative partnerships inside Yes would be defined by productive tension [music] between competing visions, this was a template worth studying. The vocal harmonies are the other element. Buffalo Springfield built their sound on voices stacked in ways that owed as much to folk music as to rock. Close, warm, [music] slightly world-weary, always melodically
inventive. Anderson’s own approach to harmony, his instinct for placing a high, pure voice against a dense harmonic backdrop, connects directly to what Stills and Young were doing here. About not paying up money because they want a hit record. First of all, what have you got? >> Buffalo Springfield again showed Anderson that a rock record could carry genuine compositional ambition without sacrificing emotional directness. [music] It could be complex and immediate simultaneously. That balance
of tension between the cosmic and the human became the defining characteristic of everything [music] Jon Anderson would go on to make. Four, Pet Sounds. Close your eyes, press play, [music] and try to name another record that sounds like this. You cannot. That is the point. Pet Sounds exists in its own atmosphere, a place where orchestration and innocence and longing exist simultaneously, >> [music] >> where Brian Wilson’s obsessive sonic architecture produces something that feels less like a pop album and more
like a document of what it feels like to be alive and uncertain >> [music] >> and reaching for something just beyond your grasp. Jon Anderson names The Beach Boys as one of the foundational musical experiences of his formative years. What he took from Pet Sounds was not the California imagery >> [music] >> or the surf-adjacent surface. It was the depth beneath it, the way Wilson layered instruments, bicycle bells, and harpsichords, and theremin and strings not for novelty, but because each
element carried a specific emotional frequency that nothing else could replicate. It was the understanding that a pop record could hold genuine feeling, genuine complexity, genuine spiritual weight without becoming inaccessible. Anderson would pursue that same combination throughout his career, music that was melodically immediate but harmonically and texturally rich enough to reward deep listening. The Yes sound, at its most characteristic, does exactly what Pet Sounds does. It pulls you in with something beautiful on the surface,
and then reveals, on closer inspection, layer upon layer of compositional detail underneath. God only knows. Wouldn’t it be nice? Caroline? No. Three songs that contain more genuine emotion per bar than most albums manage across their entire length. Anderson heard them and understood completely what music was supposed to do. >> [music] >> Not entertained, not impressed. Reach. Three. Hot Rats. Nobody sounds like Frank Zappa. That was the whole point. John Anderson has cited Zappa directly as one of the creative
visions behind the formation of Yes. [music] A musician whose absolute refusal to accept genre boundaries, whose fusion of rock and jazz and classical and comedy and pure sonic chaos pointed toward a world where anything was possible inside a single piece of music. Hot Rats is the purest distillation of that vision. No lyrics, no band politics. Just Zappa in the studio with a collection of extraordinary musicians building something that had no precedent and asked for no permission. >> [music]
>> Peaches and Regalia opens the album like a declaration of independence, melodically joyful, rhythmically complex, harmonically unpredictable, [music] and completely unlike anything that rock music had produced up to that point. What follows across the record is a sustained demonstration of what happens [music] when a musician with total compositional control and total creative freedom decides to make the most interesting [music] record he possibly can without reference to the marketplace or the critics or the
expectations of any particular audience. For Anderson, the lesson was about permission, about what becomes possible when a musician decides that the only question worth asking is whether the music is as good as it can be. Yes, at their peak operated with that same mentality. Close to the edge was not made with radio play in mind. Tales from Topographic Oceans was not made with commercial considerations in mind. They were made because Anderson and his bandmates believed, as Zappa believed, that the music itself was the only valid
measure of success. Hot Rats handed Anderson the key. What he built with it was Yes to the Inner Mounting Flame. Jon Anderson has a word for what happened the first time he saw Mahavishnu Orchestra play live, awakening. Not influenced, not [music] inspiration, awakening as though something that had been dormant inside his understanding of music suddenly opened its eyes. The Inner Mounting Flame is one of the most ferocious records ever made. John McLaughlin’s guitar operates at a speed and intensity that borders on the
physically impossible, while Billy Cobham’s drumming, polyrhythmic, thunderous, precise, redefines what a rock drummer is capable of. Between them, Jan Hammer’s keyboards and Rick Laird’s bass create a harmonic and [music] rhythmic density that jazz had never produced and rock had never imagined. The whole thing burns. What Anderson took from this record was not the technical virtuosity, though the virtuosity is staggering throughout. It [music] was the spiritual dimension. Mahavishnu Orchestra did not play music
about transcendence. They played music that was itself transcendent, that used sheer musical force as a vehicle for something beyond notes and rhythms. The album’s titles tell you everything. A Lotus on Irish Streams, Vital Transformation, The Remembering Race. This is music with a metaphysical intention. Music that believes in something larger than itself. That belief runs through everything Anderson ever made. Yes, at their most ambitious, the second side of Close to the Edge, the entirety of Tales from Topographic
Oceans, operates in the same territory. Music as a spiritual practice. Music as a means of reaching towards something the words can not quite contain. The Inner Mounting Flame showed Anderson that another band was already living in the place he was trying to reach. He went home and worked harder. [music] One Something Else Again. There are musicians who influence you technically. There are musicians who influence you spiritually. And then, very occasionally, there is a musician who does something rarer than either,
who shows you what it looks like when a human being gives everything they have to a song every single time. Without reservation, without calculation, without holding a single thing back. Richie Havens was that musician for Jon Anderson. Yes went out on their very first tour as a support act. The headliner was Richie Havens. Night after night, Anderson stood in the wings and watched a man with an acoustic guitar and an open tuning and a voice full of gravel and grace reduce rooms full of people [music] to silence and then lift them
back up again. Something Else Again was the record that sat behind those performances, raw, immediate, spiritually urgent, built on a foundation of folk and soul and something that resisted [music] easy categorization. >> [music] >> Anderson has spoken about the impact directly. He wanted to write a song in Havens honor, No Experience Necessary, as a tribute to what he had witnessed on that tour. That impulse, [music] the desire to honor a musician whose commitment had genuinely moved him,
tells you everything about the depth of the impression Havens left. What Something Else again gave Anderson was a model of total artistic sincerity. No irony, no distance, no protective layer between the musician and the emotion being expressed. Havens sang as though every song was the most important thing he had ever done. And the record captures that quality completely. Anderson built his entire vocal identity on that principle. [music] The celestial, unguarded quality of his voice, the thing that makes Yes at their
best feel like genuinely sacred music, traces a direct line back to Richie Havens standing on a stage, holding nothing back, giving everything. Seven albums, seven doorways into the imagination of one of progressive rock’s most singular voices. >> [music] >> Jon Anderson did not just listen to these records. He was transformed by them. If any of them are new to you, start tonight. [music] And if this video moved you the way this music moved him, subscribe, leave a comment, and tell us
which one speaks to you most. You.
