The concluding track on 2021’s The Quest reveals itself as a rather intriguing moment in Yes history, even before it plays.
That’s because “Damaged World,” despite serving as the first thing Yes worked on in the run up to this LP, is tacked onto the end of a bonus disc. How does something that initially convincing Steve Howe and Jon Davison to pursue an album project during informal pre-quarantine sessions end up playing an after-thought role past the main song sequence on The Quest?
It was quite a journey: Davison found himself in England before a coronavirus shut down the music industry, allowing him to connect with Howe around Halloween in 2019. Howe already had a rough sketch of “Damaged World”; they also began work on “Future Memories.”
“‘Damaged World’ was the first collaboration for the album,” Davison confirmed to the Progressive Aspect. “Steve and I decided to get together to toss some ideas around, the initial move [in] looking at doing an album.”
The session worked as something of a “test to see if working with the engineer, Curtis Schwartz, with me steering, was going to work,” Howe said in the electronic press kit for The Quest. “We felt it was pretty good and began sharing music between us, with me being able to make decisions about what Jon felt he could develop. If I liked it, then it had a bit of a roll to it.”
“Damaged World” certainly begins in a jaunty manner, as a buoyant synth figure from Geoff Downes opens the door for the last of four vocal duets on The Quest between Davison and Howe. Everything works early on in interesting contrast with the tune’s searching notions. You can see how that might spark the others.
Howe piles on both Martin MC-38 and Martin 0018 acoustics, then a Steinberger electric and Sho Bud pedal steel, making it clear that “Damaged World” began as one of his demos. Downes augments his usual bank of synths with a Hammond, while Davison employs a Martin D-28 on rhythm. It’s very much a group effort.
Moving Howe to the mic in front of the lovely-voiced Davison was, and shall remain, deeply questionable. Yet the results still become a small-scale delight. Sure, it’s a featherweight thing, but Yes was always as much about the idyllic as the astral. “Damaged World” follows in this charming tradition.
The irony is that the song’s title and its general vibe – despite the fact that they predate the lockdown era – perfectly fit with a larger theme that loosely traces through The Quest, as Yes attempts to find some sense of purpose in a world beset by the twin pestilences of COVID and climate change.
“Something like ‘Damaged World’ was really written before COVID,” Howe told the Oakland Press, “and wasn’t so much about ecology than really about people’s relationships and how damaged that can become because of a lot of things in the world. So you can add COVID into that, because it’s a right mess out there right now.”
Sometimes, he seems to admit, life simply imitates art – or at least echoes it.
“I was looking for a steer away from overt depressing references to current events: We want to uplift,” Howe told Prog magazine. “Ironically, the final song of the three bonus tracks is called ‘Damaged World’ – which sounds very much like it’s about what’s been happening but, in fact, was written before.”
Despite all of those things – the sparking, and the theme echoing, and the sheer providence of it all – “Damaged World” nevertheless finds itself on the tail end of The Quest.
Maybe that’s a kind of tribute to the creativity that it fathered, to all of the other songs Yes created in its wake. Or maybe Yes – and Steve Howe has all but admitted this – was simply reluctant to edge off into a more overt theme. (After all, they used to be pretty well known for outsized concept albums, creating a long shadow for any return to such grand ideas.)
Or maybe everybody in Yes became so familiar with “Damaged World” that they unfortunately grew bored with a pretty good track.
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