YESSONGS

It was an ambitious three-disc album. Visually the cover, the packaging, the artwork?everything made an impact. It stuns you before you even hear a single note. Owning that album was already an achievement for a Yes fan. Listening to it was something else entirely.

Can you imagine what it was like to have this musical device in 1973 A double album was already crazy now imagine a triple album. It was like buying an opera. Yessongs was not only ambitious, it was also a commercial success and the most talked-about album at the time. It wasn't until the following year, in 1974, that Emerson, Lake & Palmer released Welcome Back My Friends?, also daring to publish a triple live album. But to truly capture the full dimension of Yes in 1973, maybe even a five-LP set would have been necessary. Other bands, like Genesis, opted for single albums, and many experts in progressive music argue that one of the reasons Italian prog never broke into the mainstream was because they didn't produce strong live recordings. If that's the case, it makes you wonder: can a truly great live recording define your entire legacy.

Yessongs was recorded during the North American tour for Close to the Edge, and it has the distinction of being the last performance with Bill Bruford and the first with Alan White, who plays on most of the tracks. Musically, the album presents many limitations, especially technological ones. The band couldn't fully replicate what they were doing in the studio. Beyond those limitations, the final mix wasn't quite what anyone expected either but it ended up giving the album its unique identity. Personally, I don't mind the sound, nor do I love it; it's fine. The tracklist plays like a greatest hits collection from 1973, with highlights from The Yes Album, Fragile, and the complete Close to the Edge suite.

In addition to the audio release, Yessongs was also filmed and released in cinemas at the time a bold move that further cemented its iconic status. Over the years, the film was reissued on various video formats, always preserving its original sound. Despite the flaws in audio fidelity, this consistency gave it a timeless authenticity and raw charm that fans came to love.

I remember reading about an expedition of mountaineering doctors to Mount Everest in 1981. They were experimenting with different drugs and medications and how they were metabolized at high altitudes. I was a mountaineering enthusiast at the time and devoured everything I could on the subject. In one of the books about that expedition, I found personal notes from the members, and in them, a detail stood out: the music they listened to was Yessongs. They had it recorded on cassette and played it on Walkmans during the climb. Yes accompanied them on their journey.

From that little anecdote, I became a fan of Yes despite buying the album in the mid-80s and not actually listening to it until almost 10 years later.

I believe that this grandeur conditioned Yes' career. It took them from being a great progressive rock band to a legendary one. And it undoubtedly shaped everything that followed: longer songs, increasingly complex and ambitious albums everything was touched by the scale and impact of Yessongs.

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