MAKE IT EASY

Note that this song was recorded by what was to become Yes for the 90125 album. Tony Kaye, Alan White, Trevor Rabin and Chris Squire are here without Jon Anderson.

This single has two different edits of the song Make It Easy, released on the Yesyears boxed set. Surprisingly, neither edit is the one from the set. Both are cut very short, with most of the meat cut out.

No matter. The song begins well, with Rabin playing a fast guitar lick. Then the verse begins, dragging the song down a bit. But when the chorus starts, the song becomes abysmal arena rock. Repeat this a few times, and you have the song.

The six minute edit on Yesyears is better, but it's still dragged down by that awful chorus, but at least there is more instrumental interplay in between.

"Make it Easy" is a Yes single released in 1991, but recorded in early 1982 by guitarist/singer Trevor Rabin, drummer Alan White, and bassist Chris Squire. I assume that Rabin also played the keyboards. The main theme of the song was familiar to Yes fans, as it was often played in concert as the intro to "Owner of a Lonely Heart" - - but most of us never heard the entire song until it was released on the Yesyears boxed set in 1991. It was a minor rock-airplay hit in the US, where it was promoted to radio by Atlantic records at the same time that Arista was promoting "I Would Have Waited Forever," also by Yes, but played by an entirely different band. Both songs debuted simultaneously on Billboard's Album Rock Songs chart; neither cracked the top 30.

"Make it Easy" is a pleasant AOR song with the requisite Rabin shredding. The single, which as far as I know only appeared as a promotional CD in the US, contains two edits: a very short "short edit" (2:47) and a somewhat longer "long edit" (4:03). The shorter version gives you the gist of the song, and is a concise abridgment of the Yesyears version, which is over six minutes long. As such, it's a somewhat rare example of a single edit that's better than the album cut. The longer version is what you'd expect: like the short version, but with fewer edits. There's a very clumsy edit around 2:34 on the longer version, but it's tough to care about it when this track is extraneous anyway.

It makes sense that "Make it Easy" wasn't recorded for 90125; it wouldn't have been a good fit, and at any rate, "Changes" already covers the same ground. On the other hand, the recording sounds good, so it also makes sense that it was later released as a single to promote the Yesyears collection.

Due to the inclusion of the "short edit," the Make it Easy promo CD would be a nice curio for a Yes fan or collector. But it's far from essential, as the full version of the song can easily be had on the 2004 Rhino remaster of 90125 which, as of this writing, is the current issue.