Yes - Close to the Edge (1972)

The_Mop · 08-17-2010, 06:47 PM

This is the only Yes album I've heard, and it's pretty damn awesome. Only thing I don't like about it is the particularly spazzy intro to the title track... aside from that it's all good.

EDIT: Also, can remember a particularly funny story my dad told me - this came out when my dad was still in school, and apparently one of the kids had heard this song and thought the lyrics were the most incredible form of poetry, and decided to read out the whole thing, in it's entirety, at some social club meet or something of that sort... with all the repetitions of 'I get up, I get down'.... spoken word :P

Weird thing is, I hadn't heard anything about it being a concept album (as admittedly, I havn't looked into the background of this album that much) but my dad was under the impression that the lyrics were basically just made up out of nothing, apparently from some interview he read or something.

Guybrush · 08-18-2010, 01:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Mop

Weird thing is, I hadn't heard anything about it being a concept album (as admittedly, I havn't looked into the background of this album that much) but my dad was under the impression that the lyrics were basically just made up out of nothing, apparently from some interview he read or something.

Hehe, I did call it a concept album and my reason for doing so is really nicely summed up in this bit of quotation from Wikipedia :

Quote:

In a May 27, 1996 interview with Elizabeth Gips on her show "Changes" (KKUP, Cupertino, CA), transcribed in the Notes From the Edge fanzine, dated August 23rd, 1996, Jon Anderson mentions, probably not for the first time, that the song—indeed, the whole album—is inspired by Hermann Hesse's book Siddhartha.[2] "[We] did one album called Close to the Edge. [It] was based on the Siddhartha... You always come back down to the river. [You] know, all the rivers come to the same ocean. That was the basic idea. And so we made a really beautiful album[....]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_the_Edge_(song)

Whether or not other prog rockers think of it as a concept album, I don't really know!

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08-17-2010, 06:47 PM	#1 (permalink)
The_Mop Groupie Join Date: Aug 2010 Location: UK Posts: 17	This is the only Yes album I've heard, and it's pretty damn awesome. Only thing I don't like about it is the particularly spazzy intro to the title track... aside from that it's all good. EDIT: Also, can remember a particularly funny story my dad told me - this came out when my dad was still in school, and apparently one of the kids had heard this song and thought the lyrics were the most incredible form of poetry, and decided to read out the whole thing, in it's entirety, at some social club meet or something of that sort... with all the repetitions of 'I get up, I get down'.... spoken word :P Weird thing is, I hadn't heard anything about it being a concept album (as admittedly, I havn't looked into the background of this album that much) but my dad was under the impression that the lyrics were basically just made up out of nothing, apparently from some interview he read or something.