The Ladder (Album)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ladder
Studio album by Yes

Publication
(s)

September 20, 1999

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

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

Pop, AOR , art rock

Title (number)

11

running time

60:22

occupation

production

Bruce Fairbairn

Studio (s)

Armory Studios, Vancouver , Canada

chronology
Open Your Eyes
(1997) 		The Ladder House of Yes - Live from House of Blues
(Live album 2000)
Magnification
(Studio album 2001)

The Ladder is the sixteenth studio album by Yes . It was released in 1999. The work on the new album was preceded by another line-up change: Billy Sherwood had already become a permanent member while working on the predecessor Open Your Eyes , now the previous guest keyboarder Igor Khoroshev has also become a permanent member of the band.

Emergence

The Ladder started in November 1998 after the Open Your Eyes tour (147 shows from October 17, 1997 to October 14, 1998) had ended. At the suggestion of their management, Left Bank, and after a visit to producer Bruce Fairbairn in Vancouver in August 1998, the band members had agreed to bring him in as producer and as an objective authority for the work on an album. For the first time in a long time, Yes did not produce themselves. Left Bank had worked several times with Fairbairn, who had previously produced bands like Bon Jovi , Aerosmith , AC / DC , Poison , The Cranberries , the Scorpions and Kiss . It seemed like the best choice for everyone involved.

The band did not work on the song material directly in the studio, as is so often the case, rather the musicians prepared an abundance of material in the rehearsal room (the "Sanctuary" in Vancouver, Canada ) in autumn , from which Fairbairn initially selected eight pieces from around 15 demos, which he thought were the best. Three more were added in the course of the work, including Homeworld (The Ladder) . The sessions took place in Vancouver from January 1999, as did this preliminary work, and the recording began on February 1st. The entire stay of the band in Canada took four months.

Yes' record company pushed the band to record a second Fragile , as this album was one of the band's most artistically and commercially successful progressive rock albums, while not being as inaccessible as some of their more experimental albums from the mid-1970s. Also Going for the One (1977), also a progressive rock album that contains less complex music, was named as a reference album. At the same time, this style was to be merged with the more pop-rock-oriented music of the commercially very successful Trevor Rabin era in the 80s. The hopes of the management were in this regard on the young Billy Sherwood, who, as a supporter of the Rabin phase, was trusted to influence the music of the band accordingly. Fairbairn tried to steer the band in this direction and also wanted to make the band sound as fresh as possible and to give the new album a "live" sound as much as possible. This meant that Yes moved away from the usual extensive filing of the arrangements, which z. B. the removal of pieces or the intended use of numerous different instruments, especially by Khoroshev, had to say goodbye. Fairbairn often used the first takes instead.

The atmosphere during the work is described by everyone involved as exceptionally good - unusual for a band that in the past often fell out during recordings. This positive mood was attributed to the neutral position of Fairbairn, who acted as a respected referee between the different factions in the band and clearly stated what he liked or not, both in terms of music and lyrics. For the first time in many years, a Yes album was created in real collaboration between all those involved (the predecessor Open Your Eyes, for example, was primarily developed by Sherwood, Chris Squire and Alan White ). Problems arose from the fact that Billy Sherwood did not play a whole range of different instruments, as actually intended, but mainly took over the guitar, which in the eyes of Steve Howes curtailed his position in the band.

When the recordings, which had started in April, were about to be finished, Bruce Fairbairn died suddenly and unexpectedly on May 17, 1999 at the age of only 49. He had not appeared in the studio on time, as usual, and singer Jon Anderson , who wanted to see if everything was okay, found his body in Fairbairn's house in front of his bed. The final recordings (some vocal traces) and the final mixing of the album were then taken over by Fairbairn's long-time collaborators Mike Plotnikoff and Paul Silveira. Yes dedicated The Ladder to their late producer.

While working on the album, Anderson and the avid computer gamer Sherwood made contact with Vancouver-based Alex Garden from Sierra Studios, which was developing his science fiction computer game Homeworld at the time. Original ideas about a close connection between game and music were not realized, but Anderson changed the spiritually inspired lyrics of the song The Ladder to match the content of the game and renamed the song Homeworld (The Ladder) . In return, a second disc with a preview of the game was added to the album. In contrast to the game, however, the album was not very successful, so that the synergies of this collaboration could hardly be used. Despite its announcement as a fusion of the classic band style with the modern Yes, The Ladder only sold marginally better than the heavily criticized previous album Open Your Eyes .

After the end of The Ladder tour (September 6, 1999 - March 25, 2000 (83 shows)) Sherwood left the band. The distribution of roles with Howe hadn't worked, and he had an offer to work as a jingle composer for an American advertising company. However, he remained friends with the bassist Squire and released albums with him again and again as with some other Yes musicians.

Khoroshev had to leave the band at the end of the Masterworks Tour (June 20, 2000 - August 4, 2000, 30 shows) because he had sexually molested a young woman after a concert.

Track list

  1. Homeworld (The Ladder) - 9:32
  2. It Will Be a Good Day (The River) - 4:54
  3. Lightning Strikes - 4:35
  4. Can I? - 1:32
  5. Face to Face - 5:02
  6. If Only You Knew - 5:43
  7. To Be Alive (Hep Yadda) - 5:07
  8. Finally - 6:02
  9. The Messenger - 5:13
  10. New Language - 9:19 am
  11. Nine Voices (Longwalker) - 3:21

The Ladder (Eagle EAGCD088) reached number 36 in the UK and number 99 in the American charts .

Remarks:

  • All songs were written by Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Billy Sherwood, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Igor Khoroshev. Jon Anderson wrote all of the lyrics.
  • Homeworld (The Ladder) (originally Climbing the Ladder ) was not originally one of the songs Fairbairn selected for the album. It was then revised and was the last track on The Ladder .
  • The Caribbean flair of Lightning Strikes goes back to Jon Anderson and Alan White, who both spent time there shortly before the start of recording.
  • New Language quotes a bass run from Roundabout from the Yes album Fragile
  • Can I? , which was made during the previous tour, quotes a passage from Anderson's piece We Have Heaven , also by Fragile .
  • Face to Face quoted from Lift Me Up by Union
  • If Only You Knew is dedicated to Jon Anderson's second wife Jane, who accompanied him through a difficult time in the early 1990s.
  • Finally goes back to ideas of Sherwood and Squire, which the two developed as part of their work on the second Conspiracy album.
  • The Messenger pays homage to Bob Marley . Bruce Fairbairn encouraged Jon Anderson to write a song about a specific person.
  • Nine Voices (Longwalker) is about an Indian named Longwalker, an acquaintance of Anderson who is committed to the rights of nomadic peoples.

occupation

With

  • The Marguerita Horns (on Lightning Strikes )
  • Tom Keenlyside: piccolo and tenor saxophone
  • Derry Burns: Trumpet
  • Rod Murray: Trumpet
  • Tom Colclough: Alto Saxophone
  • Neil Nicholson: tuba
  • Randy Raine-Reusch: world music instruments

Cover

Again the fantasy artist Roger Dean was hired to design the cover of a Yes album. He used a new image, a city reminiscent of sand castles, and placed the square Yes logo on it, which had already been developed in the 1980s, and the title of the album in a newly developed font.

Review

The Ladder , with two pieces close to the 10-minute limit and one of the classic We Have Heaven reminiscent Can I? was promoted by the record company and in preliminary interviews by the musicians as the return of the band to the progressive style of the 70s or as a fusion of this style with the successful pop-rock style of the 80s. This was reflected in the cover, which combined a classic Roger Dean design with the more modern square Yes logo. With this nostalgic marketing strategy, you cut yourself into your own flesh in terms of sales figures, as the album hardly contained any classic progressive rock. The many shorter, simpler songs, which hardly differed from the material of the unsuccessful, pop-oriented previous album Open Your Eyes , could by no means tie in with the stylistic tradition of the great albums Fragile , Close to the Edge or Tales from Topographic Oceans - a discrepancy between Advertising and musical content that the band's followers quickly noticed: Latin pop ( Lightning Strikes ) and reggae influences ( The Messenger ) as well as background vocals such as "Hep Yadda", "Ooh wop" and "She-ay, Do wa bop "alienated many fans in view of a marketing strategy that a classic prog epic had suggested. In addition, with the release it turned out that the announced seventies elements consisted largely of some direct quotations from older tracks (especially from the album Fragile ), which critics soon rejected as "too wanted".

Bad sales and moderate reviews prompted the band to try to emphasize the progressive rock character in interviews: This is how the three tracks Lightning Strikes , Can I? and Face to Face described by the musicians as a kind of Caribbean trilogy. But this also turned out to be counterproductive in the end: fans who already knew the album and the three actually completely independent pieces had to be amazed, while others, who could not associate Yes with this music style, made the album first not available at all. To the disappointment of everyone involved, The Ladder hardly sold better than its predecessor (a little over 200,000 times).

Nevertheless, the band still seemed to be united behind the album: For the first time in years, Yes played a new album almost completely on the subsequent tour. With some distance, however, individual musicians admitted that they were not convinced of the music themselves. Guitarist Steve Howe, in particular, vented his anger about the song material, which he thought was too weak, about a year after the release. In fact, after The Ladder Tour (except for Nine Voices ) none of the songs were ever played live again.

live

Some pieces by The Ladder can be heard on the live DVD House of Yes - Live from House of Blues .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/1436751/20000728/yes.jhtml (last accessed on August 22, 2012)

swell