Yes’ quarantine album bides its time, waiting for just the right moment to discuss the COVID-19 shaped elephant in the room. In fact, “A Living Island” represents their only purposeful reference to the pandemic, and it doesn’t arrive until Yes closes out the main portion of 2021’s The Quest.
With lyrics written while Jon Davison was staying at his girlfriend’s family home in the Caribbean, the track also carries on a loose thread of environmentalism that runs through the entire project. Davison said he was utterly awestruck by the beauty all around. “Barbados is one of few coral islands in the world,” he told the Progressive Aspect. “It is actually a living island.”
But no one was safe from the threat of infection in 2020, not even in their remote location. Davison had initially planned a 10-day break between shared dates with his partner Emily’s father, John Lodge of the Moody Blues. They were set to leave on the next Cruise to the Edge at-sea concerts in March when rolling lockdowns began to shut everything down.
“Luckily, what kept me sane there was not only having Emily’s love and support, but Yes started working on a new album,” Davison told Jordan Rudess. “So, I was able to just dive into an escape world of creativity, which saved me.”
This living island provided a lyrical spark, which Davison then linked with on-going current events. “I felt that was a beautiful title to touch on while the world was shutting down during that initial lockdown,” Davison told the Progressive Aspect. “I felt the need to express in words all those intense thoughts and feelings, and my personal perception of it all.”
At the same time, Geoff Downes was tinkering with a separate musical idea, and the contours of this track began to form. “Jon wrote on Geoff’s music the song ‘A Living Island,'” Steve Howe told UCR’s Ryan Reed.
Downes described his rough sketch as “a grandiose theme that I’ve been working on for some time,” in a conversation with Andy Burns. A portion of the long-gestating theme even made it onto the most recent Downes Braide Association album, 2021’s Halcyon Hymns. Downes kept building until the backing track boasted the intense emotional sweep associated with this group’s typical closing sequences.
“I felt that with a band like Yes, you should really make this just go bigger and bigger,” Downes told Burns. “Yes are known for these big major chords. You know, you’ve got something like ‘And You and I.’ They take ‘Awaken,’ something like that, it is this sort of spiritual experience almost for the listener. And so, that’s really what I was trying to achieve with [‘A Living Island’] is that you get that big majestic chord sequence coming out. I think it’s a great way to finish the album.”
Despite beginning from a place that was so grounded in reality, this three-part journey found a way to deftly echo Yes’ vintage conceptualism. “The lyrical concept of the living island then branches out from the personal,” Davison told the Progressive Aspect, “and becomes more about the well-being of the world in general – and that the planet is, indeed, our precious living island in a sea of stars.”
Davison sang on an initial demo while still in quarantine, presuming that he’d have another go once Yes reconvened to complete The Quest. Yes ultimately stuck with his first pass. “We unanimously felt those original takes were so emotional, poignant and powerful,” Davison told Northern Life. “We therefore decided to keep all of it, and that’s exactly what you hear on the record.”
In the end, Howe said he was thrilled with the completed version of “A Living Island,” though his response included one important caveat. “This is a classic, epic kind of anthem to this idea [of the pandemic], but no more,” Howe remembered telling his Yes bandmates, with a laugh, in the talk with UCR. “We don’t need another song about COVID.”
The worry, Howe added, was that “when you look back at the album, you’re going to be listening to a bunch of guys moaning about the pandemic. But ‘A Living Island” was such a beautiful, romantic, epic story about being in Barbados and [the concept of] ‘who would you rather be with than somebody you love?’ It was perfect. But that’s when I said, ‘That’s it. No other songs about this thing.'”
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