ABWH - Heart Of The Sunrise (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA 1989)

This one takes me back, not only to this performance in Mountain View CA, but to its origins in rehearsals for Yes’ Fragile album of 1971. I’ve always seen this track as a kind of breakthrough blueprint for how the band might go about these long-form compositions, something we’d been aiming for without really knowing it. When we heard it, we recognised it. We’d hinted at it in bits of the Yes album, and even Time and a Word, but this baby was born complete and perfectly formed. Nothing needed to be added or removed. The arrival of Rick (Wakeman) in the band marked the first appearances of the Mellotron and Moog synthesizer, adding size and colour to the band’s sound. Rick was surprised to see how often we argued amongst ourselves, and at one point shortly after his arrival thought we were going to split. Passions can run high in this type of all-in-a-room-together collaborative creativity, not something the average session guy was used to in 1971. Anyway, this was the blueprint we built on for the sub