Talk (album)

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Talk
Studio album by Yes

Publication
(s)

March 21, 1994

Label (s) Victory Music

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

AOR , art rock

Title (number)

7th

running time

55:02

occupation

production

Trevor Rabin

chronology
Union
(1991) 		Talk Keys to Ascension
(1996)

Talk is the fourteenth studio album by the progressive rock band Yes and was released in 1994. It is the third and final album that Yes released with the cast of the successful 1980s. It is the first album of their career that the band did not release on Atlantic Records or Arista Records . Talk was released on Phil Carson's independent label Victory Records .

prehistory

In December 1991 Bill Bruford , drummer in the then eight-person Yes line-up, was asked about the Yes concerts announced for March 1992 after a concert with his jazz band Earthworks in Japan . Little did Bruford know that the band's management had planned concerts in Japan. Although he played during this follow-up to the Union tour, he left the band afterwards, mainly because of the chaotic organization of the tour and the previous work on the studio album of the same name.

In order to keep the large cast together, guitarist Steve Howe , supported by Roy Lott and Clive Davis from Yes' record company Arista Records, suggested that in the future four musicians should form a kind of core band who were responsible for the songwriting would have been assisted in the recording by several guest musicians from the various Yes lineups. But this suggestion did not meet with much approval from the other musicians. In particular, guitarist Trevor Rabin , drummer Alan White and bassist Chris Squire wanted to reform the line-up that had been so successful in the 1980s with singles like Owner of a Lonely Heart and albums like 90125 and Big Generator : Rabin, Squire, White, Kaye , Anderson. Howe left Yes, and Arista ended his contract with the band. Yes, however, stayed with their manager Tony Dimitriades and the East End Management. Then Phil Carson took the band for his newly founded label Victory Records under contract, but under the conditions that a new album would be recorded by the 1980s line-up and produced by Trevor Rabin. Rick Wakeman was supposed to remain a member of the band due to his friendly relationship with Rabin.

Steve Howe first joined his old band Asia and then pursued his solo career.

Emergence

Rabin, Squire, White, singer Jon Anderson and keyboardists Rick Wakeman and Tony Kaye started working on the next album.

Since Anderson and Rabin had clashed several times in the past due to musical differences, which were partly due to the fact that Anderson joined a new project late and only had to sing Rabin's finished songs, the new album should be in close cooperation with the both arise. Initially, the two musicians began writing songs in Rabin's studio, The Jacaranda Room (and Anderson's hotel room) in San Clemente, Southern California. Anderson sang to Rabin's demos, which were played on a portable cassette recorder, while a second recorder recorded music and vocals. The ongoing musical differences could initially be largely eliminated, but the work on the new songs was extended due to the different ways of working of the two musicians.

In the meantime, Wakeman went on a solo tour, and Squire gave a few concerts with Alan White and Billy Sherwood in August 1992 under the name The Chris Squire Experiment .

At the same time, rumors were circulating that Tony Kaye had left the band. But news from the Yes camp was rare at the time and in November 1992 Rick Wakeman could only confirm that he was still a member of Yes. He is planning to fly to the USA to record some keyboard parts there. However, on March 26, 1993, a press release was issued stating that Wakeman and Yes had split up. The status of Tony Kayes, who had only been a kind of guest musician since his return to the band in 1982, remained.

At the time, Jon Anderson was on a solo tour of North and South America.

On April 23, 1993, Victory announced that five of the seven tracks on the new album had been completed. But the work should take another year. In order to bridge the waiting time, the album The symphonic Music of Yes , which Howe and Bruford had worked out and Anderson sang , was released on October 26, 1993, recorded with an orchestra .

The sessions took place in Trevor Rabin's studio. The five musicians involved rarely played together, however, thanks to the innovative recording technology that Rabin used, this was not necessary: ​​the band was one of the first to record the album entirely on digital storage media. Rabin used the computer program Digital Performer , which made it possible to manipulate and mix individual contributions by the musicians at will. Ultimately, the data took up 10 gigabytes of storage space on four Macintosh computers, an immense amount of data for the time. Only in a few exceptional cases, with some vocal harmonies, were tapes still used. He was not only a songwriter and singer, but also an arranger and producer and also played most of the instruments himself (especially guitar and keyboards). Dissatisfied with Squire's bass parts, he even re-recorded some of them.

Because of this recording technique, the situation, unfamiliar to Yes, came about that the band only rehearsed the new pieces together when they were preparing for the album tour.

At that time the title of the album wasn't even known. Blueprint and History of the Future were traded before an agreement was reached on talk . Talk then came out about 18 months after work began on March 21, 1994.

Cover

The successful American pop-art artist Peter Max was hired to design the cover , who designed a new logo and a cover mainly in white that matched the band's modern sound. He adopted the merging colors as the only element of Roger Dean's classic Yes logo .

Track list

  1. The Calling (Anderson / Rabin / Squire) - 6:56
  2. I Am Waiting (Anderson / Rabin) - 7:25
  3. Real Love (Anderson / Rabin / Squire) - 8:49
  4. State of Play (Anderson / Rabin) - 5:00
  5. Walls (Anderson / Rabin / Roger Hodgson ) - 4:57
  6. Where Will You Be (Anderson / Rabin / Squire) - 6:09
  7. Endless Dream (Anderson / Rabin) - 15:41
    • I. Silent Spring - 1:55
    • II. Talk - 11:55
    • III. Endless Dream - 1:53

Remarks

  • Work on The Calling began with Trevor Rabin's guitar riff around which the song was expanded. There is a single version of the piece and a "Special Version" a little over eight minutes long, with an instrumental middle section. This can be heard as a bonus track on a remastered version of Talk that was released in 2002 .
  • I Am Waiting already existed as a largely finished song when Jon Anderson wrote the lyrics and did the final vocals in a single day.
  • Real Love goes back to Chris Squire's idea for a bass riff.
  • Walls was a holdover from Rabin's sessions with former Supertramp singer Roger Hodgson (who had been in conversation in 1990 to replace Jon Anderson, see Union ), which, however, had not resulted in a publication. Phil Carson wanted the song on Talk , a decision Rabin later regretted.
  • Where Will You Be was originally intended as a melody for an Australian film.
  • Endless Dream was composed by Rabin and Anderson because Phil Carson wanted an epic longtrack in the style of the old Yes on the album. Although Rabin was reluctant to agree, he was pleased with the result. For the middle section, Rabin used an orchestral piece called October , which he had already written, and which he translated into a very synthetic sound for Yes.
  • In November 1994 the Yes Active CD-ROM was released with demo versions of State of Play , Endless Dream , instrumental versions of Walls and Where will you be and live versions of I am waiting and Walls . The demo version of Endless Dream was made during Rabin's very first sessions with Anderson at Anderson's hotel in San Clemente.

occupation

Chart placements

Talk reached number 20 in the UK and number 33 in the US charts. It was the first Yes album to miss gold status in the USA. It was only sold around 300,000 times worldwide - it was hoped that around 5 million sales would be made. Victory Records went bankrupt as a result.

The reason for the commercial failure of the project was given by the band as well as the record company with the fragmentation of the American radio landscape in particular and the immense popularity of grunge at the time. Many rock musicians who had sold albums in the double-digit million range since the 1970s were only able to achieve six-figure sales in the early 1990s.

trip

Before the concert tour started, it was questioned for some time whether founding member Chris Squire would continue to stay with Yes. A few days after one of his binge drinking he was diagnosed with a heart attack, which he fortunately had at Mount Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills , which he had recently gone to because he was unwell. When Lloyd's insurance company , which was supposed to insure the planned talk tour, heard about it, it turned it down. Then it was considered to go on tour without Squire. Similar processes had already occurred several times at Yes. Squire's manager Jon Brewer was able to solve the problem, Squire recovered in time and Yes started their tour in the summer of 1994 despite Squire's ongoing alcohol problems.

The tour for the album lasted from June 18, 1994 to October 11 of the same year and included 76 concerts. The talk tour, which Yes was supposed to re-establish primarily in America, ran through the USA, Latin America ( Brazil , Chile , Argentina ) and Japan . The band didn't come to Europe because, given Talk's limited success, no promoter wanted to take on the financial risk.

Billy Sherwood, who had already worked on Union with Squire, played at the suggestion of Rabins, who was already considering at the end of the work on the studio album whether he should not leave Yes, as the second guitarist with Yes.

Concertsonics

At the concerts on the Talk Tour Yes introduced a new sound system, the Concertsonics. It enabled higher sound quality by broadcasting the live music in stereo on a portable FM receiver with headphones that the audience could bring themselves or borrow before the concert. Above all, this should enable concert-goers in acoustically unfavorable areas of the halls to have the same sound experience as the audience near the mixer. Concertsonics was developed by Clair Bros. Audio in collaboration with Yes. The Talk Tour was the first tour by a band to use this system.

Advertising programs with competitions were also broadcast over the headphones.

Yes only used this sound transmission system on the talk tour. One problem with the Concertsonic system was that the broadcast of the concert was optimized for a specific area in the hall. The audience in other areas could also receive the broadcast, but it was slightly asynchronous there.

After the tour

At the end of the relatively short talk tour, the band took a break. On May 23, 1995, a press statement appeared that said that Rabin and Kaye had left the band after 13 years. Rabin had wanted to leave the band before, but Squire first talked him out of it. Ultimately, renewed disputes with Anderson were the decisive factor for his decision. Enthusiastic about the new technical possibilities that had come into use while working on Talk , Rabin turned to film music , and in the years that followed he wrote music for several Hollywood films. Kaye gave up the music business for the time being and opened a restaurant in California. Yes reformed in the summer of 1995 in the classic line-up with Anderson, Squire, White, Wakeman and Howe. Billy Sherwood remained active in the background of Yes until he joined the band as a full member in 1997.

Sherwood (bass, vocals) and Kaye (Hammond, keyboards) founded the band Circa: in 2006 together with Alan White (drums, vocals) and the Union musician Jimmy Haun (guitar, vocals) .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b http://www.relayer35.com/Yescography/talk.htm

Sources and web links