Yes

Yes – “Leave It”

(1983 – Included on the album “90125”, Atco, 1983)

“Leave It”, or how to abandon your dreams: Yes's long road to coming to terms with the present

“Leave It” is the second single released to promote “90125”, the eleventh studio album by Yes. The record hit the market at the end of 1983 following the band's rapid reformation, after a subsidiary of Atlantic Records had spotted the enormous potential of "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", the album's first single, which not coincidentally went on to become one of the classics of 80s Aor (Adult oriented rock)/new progressive, as well as a harbinger of staggering sales figures.

The song was born out of the (in hindsight, far-sighted) determination of South African guitarist and composer Trevor Rabin to keep pushing forward the band's saga, fresh off a complete overhaul of its lineup and expressive approach. This was a band that had even been ready to ditch its original name in favour of the moniker "Cinema", a reinvention largely driven by Rabin himself and by producer and multi-instrumentalist Trevor Horn, the man behind the Buggles project, known for a debut single that became a worldwide hit, "Video Killed The Radio Stars".

The desire to modernise the sound of a band coming off a glorious run through the 70s led to the swift departure of guitarist and composer Steve Howe – a member since the magnificent "The Yes Album" (1971), who moved on to the supergroup Asia – and to an attempted absorption of the band into a re-branded project called XYZ, i.e. "Ex Yes Zeppelin", led by legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page (1981).

After a fairly successful and artistically notable record called "Drama" (1980) — which had music critics talking about a new path dubbed "Yesgles", and which still managed to preserve the band's expressive traits while blending more immediate funk/wave/disco dynamics (the track "Does It Really Happen?" was chosen as the theme for the Italian TV show "Discoring") with thoroughly contemporary sounds — the band successfully opted to bring back singer Jon Anderson, the mind and driving force behind the ensemble's poetics, alongside Howe and Chris Squire (the only member present on every album, right up until his death in 2015).

The result was a record far removed from the band's earlier saga: much drier in its expressive traits, modern in its sounds, complex in its rhythmic textures and vocal interplay. It was also a record sparing in those ever-shifting, fluid instrumental solutions that had once defined the band's typically imaginative verve and its ante-litteram new-age spirit. Who were Yes, after all? "The" band that epitomised symphonic rock, since — considering the most familiar names of the era within "art rock" – the saga of Nico and John Cale, of Van Der Graaf Generator, of King Crimson (only the first two albums by Robert Fripp's band have any real kinship with Yes's path, and it's no coincidence that Jon Anderson was called in to sing the opening of the fairy-tale-like yet delirious suite on the third incarnation of King Crimson, "Lizard", before the band moved elsewhere, toward dynamics close to what would only much later be labelled math rock), of Gentle Giant, of Robert Wyatt and his outbursts, of Frank Zappa, of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, of the bands from the Canterbury scene, of Popol Vuh and the cosmic couriers, of the psychedelic pioneers, and of Italy's own Area International POPular Group – the "symphonic" idea had only ever been treated as one possible means, never an indispensable one, and rarely tilted toward anything "classicising", but rather toward the realm of contemporary avant-garde, new jazz and the emerging electronic scene.

The only real kinship worth drawing is with Emerson Lake & Palmer. More loosely, and with huge differences in outlook, one could also draw a comparison to the far more theatrical Genesis (the band's longtime drummer, Bill Bruford, was briefly a member of Genesis in 1976, before parting ways with the group under new leader Phil Collins, citing — a justification he later retracted — that the band's new music "was banal and tried to convey meanings that made no sense for a pop outfit"), as well as to contemporary international names such as Italy's own Premiata Forneria Marconi, France's Ange and the Netherlands' Focus, to name but a few, given their shared roots in a love of properly classical music — that spanning from the Baroque period to late Romanticism. Other possible, and no less apt, comparisons include Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother", Deep Purple's "Concert For Group And Orchestra", the Nice's "Five Bridges" and, last but not least, Procol Harum's "In Held 'Twas In I".

Yes, however, had first and foremost proven to be the English band with the sturdiest entrepreneurial instincts: as early as their third album they had sniffed out the need to target the New World by blending the expanded traditional ballad, seasoned with elements dear to psychedelia, with blues undertones and classicising touches that would increasingly spill over with the arrival of keyboardist Rick Wakeman, musical-theatre elements ("Siberian Khatru"), pure sonic and timbral exploration, pre-new-age lyrics, harmonies borrowed from Crosby Stills Nash & Young and... country! No "bad vibrations" were ever expressed in the band's sonic design: everything was geared toward reassurance, toward saying "in the end, it's entertainment". An entertainment that soon turned into technical showmanship, propped up by improvisational chops unheard of for the era (and really the preserve of just a few members of the group — chiefly Squire, Howe and Bruford), displayed to the nth degree, to the point of warping the originally naive spirit of the songs and their utterly simple melodic lines, building instead elusive sonic architectures propped up by a starting idea that was essentially nonexistent. Many, however, have read this drift as a contemplative endpoint rather than an excess. It's no coincidence that the band would speak of geometries (rhythmic ones above all) drawn from the composer Igor Stravinsky, though they would take absolutely nothing from his obsession with a "deviant" harmony, with a "perfectly disturbing" balance (Yes's harmonies remain in perfect keeping with the tonal system so dear to pop, save for a few different attempts on the album "Relayer").

Coming back to "90125": critics, almost unanimously — with the exception of reactions to the first single released — were not particularly generous toward the new record, but its commercial success was truly considerable (six million copies sold, figures unthinkable today for anyone, even decades after a release), bearing in mind that "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" became a dancefloor staple of the era and in the decades since, right up to today, on a par with David Bowie's "Let's Dance", released the same year.

"Leave It" didn't match the impact of the first single, for reasons that will be clear from the discussion that follows, but in some ways it was the track on the record best able to bring together some of the band's glorious past inventiveness with new expressive ambitions, courtesy of the Buggles brand and Rabin's exuberant, at times almost cartoonish, songwriting — not by chance, he would go on to become a hugely successful composer of fantasy/thriller and gothic film scores, nominated for and winner of Grammy Awards.

The song was preceded by a modest music video, drawing on a visual style close to that of Talking Heads. King Crimson (with "Discipline") had already borrowed not only visual elements from the brilliant David Byrne's band, but also a strikingly similar vocal delivery and an "authentic" minimalism (not mere "reductionism"), thus referencing the scene that had made its way into concert halls, La Scala included... but only many, many years after the first public performances of the major works of the likes of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Wim Mertens and the earliest Michael Nyman. The video aired in the spring of 1984 on the fledgling music channel MTV, where the video for the album's first single had already made a huge impact — that one amounting to a genuine short film, entrusted to the Hipgnosis studio, famed for Pink Floyd's album covers starting with "Atom Heart Mother", and which had also handled the cover art for the same Yes's beautiful album "Going For The One".

The band's classic album covers, meanwhile — rightly regarded as genuine works of art — were and still are the work of the celebrated artist Roger Dean, and they contributed no small amount to shaping the imagery surrounding Yes's sound, originally forged by the brilliant producer Eddy Offord, who, following in the footsteps of what Sir George Martin had done with the Beatles, treated the recording studio as an additional member of the band — if not its most important one.

Track analysis

The intro alone (actually only present as an extended version on the 2004 remaster under discussion here) makes plain the gap between what the new radio-friendly essence demanded and what the musicians' spirit was actually reaching for. Against a forced, geometric immediacy (one senses a deliberate display and a refinement that's far from "free of aesthetic constraints" - something unfortunately quite common in Yes compositions from 1974 onward, with the exception of the late classic album "Going For The One", a few passages on "Drama", the two albums titled "Keys To Ascension" and, above all, the remarkable "Magnification" from 2001), complex rhythms in odd time signatures are laid down by the bass-and-drums section, while keyboards and guitars move along other rhythmic and melodic trajectories, producing polyrhythm and polyphony (the latter fully within the tonal system, since no dissonance appears, as per the band's tradition, and without any particular jazz-derived modes).

The "liquid" guitar tone Rabin gets here sounds remarkably close to Steve Hackett's on "Wind And Wuthering" and everything Genesis did after it, though with a heavier emphasis on the whammy bar and lightning-fast descending scales.

Even more striking are the lead vocals that follow (every member of the band has always chipped in on backing vocals), here handled not just by Jon Anderson but also by Trevor Horn. A startling display of be-bop vocalese, one step away from nascent beatboxing (Bobby McFerrin would later become its supreme technical exponent, pushed to the point of paroxysm), is set against the far more melodic voice of Jon Anderson. It's obvious where this invention comes from: Horn, as a member of Art of Noise, was well versed in the avant-garde currents of his time, and drawing on Futurism and Luigi Russolo, he ended up coining the idea of a ready-made (a cut-up) applied with disorienting mastery to sound - and, in this case, to singing.

Horn had access to a futuristic synthesizer capable of generating sounds whose waveform could be drawn directly with a light pen on the monitor - effectively a forerunner of today's touchscreen. It was an instrument that cost 20,000 Australian dollars to produce a single unit (20,000 pounds as its retail price). It was precisely the Fairlight that gave the record its unique character, not least because very few could afford an instrument of that cost, imported from Australia no less.

On this track Anderson displays the full maturity of control and harmonic richness of his natural alto voice (not falsetto - his voice has never been capable of any low register whatsoever), at times remarkably graceful, at others slightly tart, the way a child's voice can sound. It's no coincidence that the vocalist is considered one of the very first exponents of "muzak" singing in the history of contemporary music (airy, relaxing, with no diaphragmatic push or exaggerated resonator use to amplify overtones, but with consonants accentuated with childlike exuberance). His only true contemporary parallel was Demis Roussos (member of the Greek group Aphrodite's Child), not coincidentally chosen by Greek composer Vangelis alongside Anderson as his favoured collaborator (a case apart is represented by his two albums made with the greatest interpreter of Italian voice-theatre to date, Milva, whom we recently wrote about on these pages). Later on, the foremost followers of this vocal style were Roger Hodgson of Supertramp above all, Geddy Lee of Rush and, in part, Sting. A vocal style that, in some cases (Anderson's included), is downright "freak" - the voice of someone whose singing register never broke at puberty (a very rare occurrence, though one that does belong to the classical-Baroque operatic world, as with Radu Marian), preserving the boy-chorister training of the Anglican tradition.

Trevor Horn's lead vocal entrance, jazz-derived but sung with a lightness that's thoroughly pop and a baritone timbre, latches directly onto the vocalese, achieved using both real vocal sounds and synthesized samples panned to exaggerate the stereo image. As soon as the words "Leave It" appear in the chorus, Anderson's classic backing vocals follow, playfully pitched somewhere up in the heavens and here unmistakably given a disco flavour (as had already happened with "State Of Independence", released as a duet with Vangelis and later turned into a hit by Donna Summer).

The percussion has a sound typical of the era - extremely dry snare and tom tones, the kind used both in wave and electronic music (and also in pop, as pioneered by Phil Collins of Genesis with the magnificent "In The Air Tonight") and certainly in hair metal.

At the 3:27 mark the Fairlight bursts in with a sample of an orchestral ensemble and percussion, later dubbed "Orch Hit" by the early Yamaha sound generators, announcing a sudden change of tempo, as if the track wanted to lose its beat only to reassemble itself in reverse. Chris Squire's rock-solid Rickenbacker bass emerges, run through two different amplifiers (a guitar amp for the high frequencies and a bass amp for the low ones), letting him shape his instrument's sound - played with a pick - with the same technical dynamics as a lead guitar.

The short verses alternate with the more extended choruses before an instrumental bridge at the 4:54 mark, where the rhythms once again fall into odd time signatures with constant shifts, set against vocals of equal rhythmic complexity yet effortless to listen to. This effective device already peeks through at 5:25, on the chorus, repeated over and over until the track's close, where it merges with the verse's opening line, sung first by Rabin and then by Anderson, leading to a simple conclusion with a descending keyboard glissando over the line "Leave It!".

The lyrics, while not entirely free of hermeticism, leave behind the imagery of the past and speak directly of "leaving royal courts" and "paradises", bitterly mocking "dream days" and calling for the destruction of those built by "men of success" - the kind of men who today are capable of a rueful acknowledgment of the cynical weakness that comes with the passage from youth to maturity.

Conclusions

The track is the portrait of an era that now feels culturally distant, unless one considers the underground universe that's still very much alive globally today, even if rarely in sync with professionalism, let alone with audience numbers or sales. It was an era in which the word "avant-garde" still meant something even near the top of the world's charts - something that stopped being the case between the late Nineties and the early 2000s. However hostile the music criticism of the time may have been toward Yes's necessary adaptation to market demands, it's worth remembering that bands as glorious as this one either dissolved entirely with the arrival of punk (sadly, Gentle Giant above all) or embraced the new currents in radical fashion, as in the extreme case of Van Der Graaf Generator (later K Group, following only their leader Peter Hammill, who with the original band had already released, ahead of its time, the only successful album of the Seventies made up of just three suites, "Pawn Hearts", the natural aesthetic antithesis of Yes's "Close To The Edge") and of King Crimson, albeit in a more intellectual way.

Chris Squire and co.'s band, as the undisputed protagonist of that era - alongside Genesis first and foremost, then Jethro Tull (who went from being the biggest band of the day to a cult act in short order) and Pink Floyd, the latter clearly leaning more toward a psychedelic dimension but by no means untouched by the phenomenon - inevitably had to find a new aesthetic key in order to survive, reinvent themselves and give fresh momentum to their path.

It all happened through one meeting - with Rabin - without which the Yes story would have come to an end, and instead it remains alive to this day. What's more, considering "Drama", the previous album, the evolution the band underwent was, consciously or not, a linear one. As already mentioned, "Leave It" as a single acted as an illuminating watershed between tradition and future (a feat, incidentally, never repeated, as with the use of beatboxing), and to this day - precisely because it's an important yet not especially famous track - it stands as an example of how it's possible to work sideways within a pop-rock album, offering thoroughly innovative alternatives without ever claiming purist intent. A vision that made sense, as noted, right up until the turn of the millennium, after the mid-Sixties, the whole of the Seventies and the early Eighties had envisioned an altogether different prospect: that of expression for its own sake, without too much concern for financial return and, above all, without limits on expression, because there was a market for those who took risks with stubborn conviction, and even where there wasn't, glory was in some way guaranteed (as Tim Buckley proves).

There was indeed an era - one that has since gradually faded - in which being an "artist" didn't just mean showing that you were "good/skilled", having an image and real charisma, but meant being able to offer a personality and a creative aesthetic distinguishable from a thousand others, being able to shift the perception of what creative work could be even just one step beyond what had already been sown. Well, today the opposite holds true. An artist is whoever develops a suitable image thanks to the people backing them. Otherwise, one is "merely a professional/craftsman". So, where art is lacking today, professionalism and pedagogy have absolute room to grow, without requiring underground artistic heroics - welcome as those may be. The Yes of "Leave It" are as much professionals as they are artists, even if the compromise between the "absolute freedom of form and content" of the Seventies, loudly demanded by longtime fans, and the need to channel that same freedom into more accessible forms at the time was met with great reservation, if not outright derision. Could this "professionalism" today be a way of reviving authentic art, the way workshops once were, far from the spotlight of today's talent shows?

Major Legacies

In their own era, Yes's principal legacy was the influence they exerted on Rush, both as an energetic display of brilliant technical skill filtered through a rock lens, and above all in terms of vocal approach. Likewise, the architecture of Yes's harmonies profoundly shaped Queen, who, not by chance and as a declared token of gratitude, brought in Steve Howe as classical guitarist to give voice to one of the most memorable variations in their epitaph track "Innuendo". Later on, much of the new progressive scene, chasing success and well aware that overt technical, classically-inflected showmanship was a path that could win over audiences, found clear followers in IQ, Pendragon, Pallas, and Anathema.

Coming to "Leave It" and the album it was taken from, the geometries on display here – heavily showcased in terms of technique and, live, pushed to extremes in Levin's guitar phrasing, which shuns any hint of melodic warmth or spiritual introspection in favour of an energetic display – would become raw material especially for the emerging heavy prog of Dream Theater.

Curiously, in the 1990s a band from the more experimental fringe of progressive rock, labelled Rock in Opposition for their libertarian political content and the resulting "extreme" way of laying out sonic textures, 5uus, went down in history as "The dark Yes". The band made a masterpiece album titled "Hunger's Teeth", on which the singer's voice was almost identical to Anderson's, studio production functioned as a further instrument within the ensemble, and the sonic exploration was a natural evolution of the original Yes's path, but all delivered with an air of social protest.

The band's most far-reaching legacy, however, emerged in 2009 with the release of an album under the name Necks titled "Silverwater". The record shows – curiously at a time of total hostility towards progressive rock – a constant, euphonious technical restlessness among the players, paired with exuberant rhythms and an equally exuberant compositional spirit. The record would be hailed by independent critics as one of the cornerstones of the 2000s.

After the band's decision to replace Jon Anderson with clones recruited from tribute bands, Yes have now become, in the eyes of both critics and audiences, a tribute band of themselves – a curious dead end for a group that spent years singing new-age platitudes amid cocaine abuse and internal wars, all in pursuit of nothing but mainstream success.

I can feel no sense of measure

No illusions as we take

Refuge in young man’s pleasure

Breaking down the dreams we make real

One down one to go

Another town and one more show

Downtown they’re giving away

But she never came back

No phone can take your place

Do you know what I mean

We have the same intrigue

As a court of kings

Ah leave it, ah leave it

Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit

Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot

Two down there you go

McArthur Park in the driving snow

Uptown they’re digging it out

Better lay your claim

Get home you’re not alone

You just broke out of the danger zone

Be there to show your face

On another dreamy day

Ah leave it, ah leave it

Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit

Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye bad

Leave it

Hello, hello, heaven

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye bad

Leave it

Hello, hello, heaven

I can feel no sense of measure

No illusions as we take

Refuge in young man’s pleasure

Breaking down the dreams we make real

Ah leave it, ah leave it

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye bad

Leave it

Hello, hello, heaven

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye bad

Leave it

Hello, hello, heaven

Ride the wave of great music

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10/04/2026