The release of the new Yes album coincides roughly with the release of an album by Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman.
Now Anderson and Wakeman wrote a lot of the music that was turned down when the others in Yes decided to forge alliances with Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, in 1979 to 1980. Right after Tormato.
This is strange, because “We Can Fly From Here” (whence the title of the new album) is a song left over from that era.
Repetition is inevitable. The point is, when you're a conscious being, to go through the repetition with more awareness each time. There's a lot of repetition when you are in a band for that long: think of all the verse–chorus–verses, all the touring, all the comeback tours, all the reforming. What did Freud say? Repetition is death.
This has to do with the main song on the new album in any case. Sung by older guys it's clearly about death. I understand the video is the story of a man who boards a flight only to find that the plane is full of passengers from the 1940s, when Yes members were born:
an airline passenger awaiting his flight, while reading a magazine article, complete with photographs, about a 1940s Hollywood mogul who died tragically in a plane crash as a result of “pilot error.” The man finishes reading, runs down a flight of stairs, and boards his plane, only to find the same '40s era cast of characters aboard, with a stewardess leading him to the cockpit to pilot the plane...
When the guy flies the plane, he's flying in the bardo, yes? What a great concept. Somehow the postmodernism of Buggles (Horn's original outfit, remember “Video Killed the Radio Star”?) meets the grandeur of Yes, but with some death thrown in. Death is the one place that the coruscating Anderson often refuses to go, with notable exceptions (“Endless Dream” on Talk, for instance). I'm looking forward to what they do. Flying is death, isn't it?
The album cover is of a Dean painting that he made in 1970, that is, before he was hired by the band to paint the cover for Fragile...
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