Open Your Eyes (Album)

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Open your eyes
Studio album by Yes

Publication
(s)

November 24, 1997

Label (s) Eagle Records ( UK )
Beyond Music ( US )

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

AOR , art rock

Title (number)

12

running time

74:12

occupation

With

production

Yes

chronology
Keys to Ascension 2
(1997) 		Open your eyes The Ladder
(1999)

Open Your Eyes is a music album by the band Yes that was released in 1997. Yes, there has always been an almost continuous line-up change, keyboardist Rick Wakeman had left before this album . Billy Sherwood , who had been in conversation before Union as a replacement for Anderson and since then has been active as an official or unofficial member of Yes in the band's environment (on Talk , Keys to Ascension , Keys to Ascension 2 , after Open Your Eyes on The Ladder , at the Chris Squire Experiment , at Conspiracy and Circa :) , had become a band member due to the album's special genesis. The keyboardist Igor Khoroshev , only hired as a studio musician for the album , became a permanent member of the band during the following tour.

Emergence

When two Yes albums were released within a few weeks in 1997, the fan base reacted with amazement. Since the early 1980s, people had got used to years of intervals between releases of new studio material.

The background to this unusual release policy was the change of management and record company in 1997, a process during which keyboardist Wakeman had left the band several times. Due to the poor sales of the album Keys to Ascension (1996), which Yes' then record company CMC had attributed to the fact that Yes had not gone on tour to promote the album, CMC prevented the release of the direct successor Keys to, planned for spring 1997 Ascension 2 first. Then the band changed the record company again.

Yes wanted to go on tour now, but their new record company Eagle / Beyond insisted that the band should deliver new material first, as they feared half empty halls if Yes were to tour without a new product. However, since there was hardly any new song material, it was decided, similar to 90125 , to quickly convert the album Chemistry of the Squire / Sherwood project Conspiracy , which was just emerging at the time, into a Yes album. Squire, Sherwood and White then began to work on a presentable album as quickly as possible, Anderson came a little later, but Howe was only able to join towards the end of the work due to time constraints, so he had little influence on the music. Most of the guitar work comes from Billy Sherwood, who also recorded most of the keyboard parts, as the band didn't have a keyboard player at the time. Igor Khoroshev, who was supposed to operate the keyboard instruments during the Open your Eyes tour, was also only brought on board by Anderson towards the end of the work. Khoroshev had sent Anderson a band with his own compositions, which he liked, which is why he should become a permanent member of the band during the course of the tour. He replaced some keyboard parts from Sherwood, and Steve Howe had a guitar solo removed to make room for another contribution by Khoroshev. Khoroshev can be heard on New State of Mind , No Way We Can Lose and Fortune Seller .

On the theme song Open Your Eyes , the session musician Steve Porcaro ( Toto ) plays keyboards, which was also used on earlier versions of the piece. B. 1992 by Squire's hobby band The Chris Squire Experiment played can be heard.

When Eagle / Beyond announced the release of the new Yes album under the name Open Your Eyes for the spring of 1998 and an accompanying tour for October, CMC decided to release Keys to Ascension 2 after all, in order to get rid of the competitor's marketing to benefit. Although Eagle / Beyond brought the release of Open Your Eyes forward to November 24, 1997, putting the band under enormous pressure of time, Keys to Ascension 2 was released three weeks before the competing product, on November 3, 1997.

Track list

  1. New State of Mind - 6:00
  2. Open Your Eyes - 5:14
  3. Universal Garden - 6:16
  4. No Way We Can Lose - 4:56
  5. Fortune Seller - 5:00
  6. Man in the Moon - 4:41
  7. Wonderlove - 6:06
  8. From the Balcony - 2:43
  9. Loveshine - 4:37
  10. Somehow ..... Someday - 4:47
  11. The Solution - 5:25
  12. hidden track - (Ambient sounds, 16:21, after a 2 minute break)

All the songs were written by Anderson, Squire, Howe, White, and Sherwood.

Remarks

  • Open Your Eyes was re-released in a different version in 2000 on the Conspiracy album Conspiracy under the title Whish I knew .
  • Man in the Moon can also be found in a different version on Conspiracy .
  • A 16-minute ambient track was attached to the album, which mixes excerpts from the Open your Eyes songs and the ambient sounds from the beginning of Close to the Edge (from the album of the same name ). This was played during the 1997-98 tour in North America and Europe before the concerts began
  • The Chemistry song Light in My Life was not used, it can be heard on the first Conspiracy album

Single releases

  1. Open Your Eyes Radio Edit (4:10) / Open Your Eyes Album Version (5:14) 1997
  2. No Way We Can Lose 1997
  3. New State of Mind Radio Edit (4:11) / New State of Mind Dual Solo Edit (4:17) / New State of Mind Album Version (short ending) (5:23) / New State of Mind Album Version (6: 00) 1997

Cover

Because of the limited time, it was decided to only use Roger Dean's classic Yes logo on the cover against a black background. In view of the mainstream nature of the music, an elaborate Roger Dean cover would have been completely out of place.

Review

The short time between the release of the previous album Keys to Ascension 2 and Open Your Eyes amazed many fans. This was due to the change of record company and management. While the previous record company delayed the release of Keys to Ascension 2 in order to compete with Open your Eyes , the new management did everything to make the two Keys to Ascension albums forgotten - which was not exactly beneficial for the band's record sales: So There was a sticker on the cover of Open Your Eyes that described the new album as the band's first studio album since Talk - an attempt to tie directly to the successful Rabin era, but at the same time a signal that was sent to the fans of the band caused a bit of astonishment, as both Keys to Ascension albums had included new studio material.

Open Your Eyes only contains short, comparatively simple songs, which, according to the history of the album, are clearly recognizable as Conspiracy songs (and far less than Yes songs). After the longtracks on the two Keys to Ascension albums, in which Yes fans had seen a return to the style of the 70s, this was a disappointment for many. The lion's share of the material comes from Squire and Sherwood, including the title track Open Your Eyes , which was re-released in a Conspiracy version in 2000 on the album Conspiracy under the title Whish I knew . Howe's contribution is limited to the short From the Balcony , a piece that Anderson heard, wrote lyrics to, and added to the album in the final days of the recording sessions. Somehow ..... Someday uses a melody from the song Boundaries from Jon Anderson's solo album Animation (1982), which he had already reused on The Promise Ring under the title O'er shortly before the release of Open Your Eyes . But the band did not achieve any noteworthy commercial success with these songs, which were more tailored to the single market: The album reached number 151 in the US charts (represented for one week), while it did not even appear in the hit lists in its home country England. It only sold about 200,000 times in total.

Shortly after the start of the tour, the phrase "Don't expect to hear anything from" Open Your Eyes "again" could be read on the internet. Yes only played the theme songs and From the Balcony regularly on the Open Your Eyes tour , No Way We Can Lose was only played twice, and New State of Mind could be heard during the sound checks. Steve Howe was soon extremely critical of the album, and even Billy Sherwood, who together with Chris Squire put most of the work into the project, now describes it as a compromise. Open Your Eyes is widely considered to be their worst album by fans of the band today. In fact, Yes have not played a piece of Open Your Eyes live since 1998 .

Ultimately, the album can be compared with 90125 : that record was originally intended for a completely different project and was only declared a Yes album at the last moment.

live

  • Open Your Eyes was played 147 times live on the 1997/1998 Open your Eyes tour
  • No Way We Can Lose was played twice live on the Tour Open your Eyes 1997/1998
  • From The Balcony was played 43 times live on the Open your Eyes 1997/1998 tour

swell

Web links