Heaven & Earth

chronology
Heaven & Earth
Studio album by Yes
Publication ; (s)	2014
Label (s)	Frontiers Records
Format (s)	CD
Genre (s)	Pop, AOR , folk rock
Title (number)	8th
running time	51:27
occupation	Jon Davison - vocals , guitar ; Steve Howe - guitar, vocals; Chris Squire - electric bass , vocals; Alan White - drums ; Geoff Downes - keyboard ;
production	Roy Thomas Baker
Studio (s)	Neptune Studios, Los Angeles , CA

Heaven & Earth is the twenty-second studio album by the progressive rock band Yes , released in 2014.

Emergence

Yes' twenty-first studio album " Fly from Here ", despite the expensive and critically acclaimed production by Trevor Horn, did not meet with the undivided enthusiasm of a large fan base. Too many tracks on the album were just old songs that had been left too weak in various previous sessions and that had now been recorded. A studio album by the band has been in the red once again.

To make up for the losses, Yes' record company, Italian oldie label Frontiers Records , sent the band on long tours playing only their old classics - something they had been doing since the Keys to Ascension era in the mid-1990s would have. Since then, the set lists of the Yes concerts have been strikingly similar and consisted primarily of songs from the albums " The Yes Album ", " Fragile ", " Close to the Edge " and " Going for the One ". Only sporadically, on the occasion of new releases, were new pieces interspersed.

Benoît David, singer on "Fly from Here", who had been criticized by the other band members for some time because he was not involved in the songwriting himself, has now been replaced by Jon Davison , previously with the band Glass Hammer . Apart from his voice, which was similar to that of longtime Yes singer Jon Anderson , he wrote songs himself, unlike his direct predecessor. Against the background of the fact that "Fly from Here" had largely consisted of old ideas from the 1980s, it became clear that Yes urgently needed new song material that the other members could not or would not write themselves. In view of the criticism of "Fly from Here" they did not want to go back to old material, so new member Jon Davison also became the main songwriter of the band.

In the face of the financial catastrophe of "Fly from here", Frontiers forced Yes to make drastic savings. While the new songs were being written, the band was hardly ever completely assembled. The members had been living in different countries for years, so it would have been time-consuming and expensive to gather the whole band in one place for weeks and months. So Davison traveled from one member to the next with his demos: at the end of 2012 he visited bassist Chris Squire in Phoenix, Arizona, after which he flew to Seattle to meet with drummer Alan White . He then flew to England in December 2013 to work initially with guitarist Steve Howe and ended up joining keyboardist Geoffrey Downes in Wales.

The first songs Davison and Squire worked on were "The Game" and "In a World of Our Own". "The Game" came from previous sessions on an unrealized solo album Squires, but Davison did most of the work. This eventually went so far that he even wrote most of the bass lines for Chris Squire.

It wasn't until the beginning of 2014, just days before the start of recording, that the band got together in Los Angeles to put the finishing touches on the pieces in joint rehearsals.

In order to keep costs down during the studio recordings that followed, Frontiers did not even allow Yes half the time they normally need in the studio. Instead of four or five months, "Heaven & Earth" had to be completed in two months: The band was at Neptune Studios in Los Angeles from January 6th to March 14th, 2014. The usual, sophisticated arrangements of the progressive rock band Yes could hardly be realized due to time and cost reasons.

These time and cost savings could not pass the music by: The songs and their arrangements had to remain unusually simple for the band's circumstances, as did the sound and production. Of necessity, the decision was made to give the songs more volume by using a rhythm guitar, which took far less time compared to the artistic means usually used by Yes. Since Steve Howe hardly plays rhythm guitar, Jon Davison took on this task, for which he was expressly praised by Howe.

Towards the end of the recordings, the band ran out of time. At times the musicians played their parts separately in three different studios in order to meet the deadline. In addition, a major reshuffle was necessary: shortly after Squire had stated in an interview that producer Baker would be doing the mix "next Monday", it was announced that Billy Sherwood had suddenly been entrusted with it. Technical problems were initially cited as the reason, but Steve Howe later admitted that Baker hadn't been able to make the sketchy "Heaven & Earth" sound like a Yes album: the band and record company were dissatisfied with Baker's production. So without further ado, the former Yes member Billy Sherwood was hired to complete the mix and mastering in just a few days and save what could be saved. In just ten days, Sherwood remixed the album.

The album was finally released on July 16, 2014 in Japan, July 18 and 21 in Europe, and July 22 in North America.

Leak

"Heaven & Earth" was leaked a few weeks before its official release . Assumptions that a Frontiers employee was responsible for this and wanted to deliberately damage the band or the record company were widespread (band members also took part in speculation) but were never officially confirmed.

Track list

"Believe Again" (Davison / Howe) (8:02)
"The Game" (Squire / Davison / Johnson) (6:51)
"Step Beyond" (Howe / Davison) (5:34)
"To Ascend" (Davison / White) (4:43)
"In a World of Our Own" (Davison / Squire) (5:20)
"Light of the Ages" (Davison) (7:41)
"It was All We Knew" (Howe) (4:13)
"Subway Walls" (Davison / Downes) (9:03)

Bonus track on the Japanese edition:

"To Ascend" acoustic version (4:33)

Remarks

Several pieces were developed to different extents by the band, but were not included on the album due to lack of time:

"Horizons", a long track that combines different styles into one piece that is supposed to be reminiscent of "Close to the Edge". The song was not finished due to lack of time and should be a central piece on a next album.
"Breaking Down on Easy Street" (Squire / Davison or Squire / Davison / White)
"From the Moment" or "To the Moment"
"Midnight" (possibly by Squire / White)
"Don't Take No for an Answer"
A piece that Howe and Davison wrote together, which is probably called "Zenith" and is supposed to be reminiscent of "Tempus Fugit" from the album " Drama ".
A song that Squire, Downes and Davison wrote.

occupation

Cover

In order to build on the design of the classic Yes albums, the fantasy artist Roger Dean was hired again, who has been responsible for many Yes album covers since the 1970s . He also contributed the album title with the picture "Heaven & Earth".

Chart successes

Heaven & Earth reached number 23 in the German, number 20 in the English and number 26 in the American charts .

Review

Heaven & Earth's release received a lot of criticism. A first review by Anil Prasad on his Facebook page was a slap that Prasad soon withdrew for unknown reasons. He had called Heaven & Earth the worst Yes album to date and compared it to ELP's "In the hot Seat". In the weeks that followed, however, he received numerous critics. Among other things, Davison's songwriting was criticized, which was simply too simple and undemanding for Yes (the comparison was made several times with children's songs), the lightweight, folky overall sound (which some fans explicitly praised), and the lack of elaborate, progressive-rock-typical arrangements (In this context, "Subway Walls" was usually highlighted as the only exception), as well as the production, which can be clearly heard that it was cheap. Roy Thomas Baker and Billy Sherwood were also criticized for their work, the former even from within the band itself, the latter mainly because of the flat sound of the singing voices, which are also asynchronous and dissonant.

Although some fans received the album well, Heaven & Earth is widely considered to be one of the band's weakest albums.

Individual evidence

[1] Chris Squire: "Fly from Here (...) ended up costing us." in the July 2014 issue of the UK magazine "Prog"

[pressofAtlanticCity_2nd_April_2014-2] Veteran rockers Yes bring classic albums in entirety to Borgata . pressofatlanticcity.com. April 2, 2014. Retrieved April 11, 2014.

[3] July issue of the British magazine "Prog", 2014.

[4] [1]

[5] "Chris Squire and I got together and worked on 'The Game' and 'In a World of Our Own' back in 2012." ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2

[6] In an interview, Howe stated that Davison "wrote massive bass lines for this album".

[7] Davison in June 2014: "then we came together as a group. And, as a whole band, we then constructed the songs; the demos, we brought to life. You know, everyone learned the parts, or reinvented the parts." ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2

[8] Squire in an interview with Jon Kirkman (June 2014): "We're used to a Yes album usually taking about four or five months from the beginning to the end of the mixing, but we really only had about two."

[9] Howe in August 2014: "“ It Was All We Knew ”was a song that stayed like it was originally, more or less."

[10] Davison in November 2014: "It was done in such a pushed and rushed sort of fashion that we didn't get to collaborate as much as a collective (...) Heaven and Earth in some respects is a safe album, a very safe album, because of the time constraints we just had to nail it down and get really specific very quickly and I want to have more time to explore as they did in the earlier years and really stretch things and see how far out on a limb we can go and of course you need funding to do that. "

[11] Howe in September 2014: "Jon plays rhythm guitar. I like his rhythm work. It's really good to have a great rhythm guitarist in the group."

[12] [2]

[13] Chris Squire in an interview with Jon Kirkman in June 2014

[14] Howe: "We just didn't feel that it was quite Yes" (seemingly referring to an initial mix by Baker). He continued: "Billy has a history with the band (...) we trusted him (...) That's how the swinging roundabout came; we might have been going around with this with Roy Thomas Baker, but that's not how we finished it. "

[15] [3]

[16] [4]

[17] [5]

[18] Reviews on the baby blue pages