Solid Mental Grace: Listening to the Music of Yes

by Simon Barrow

In Solid Mental Listening to the Music of Yes , Simon Barrow looks at how the progressive rock band Yes helped define a musical genre, combining sounds and textures to produce lengthy, elliptical compositions. Journeying through many highs and lows towards its remarkable 50th anniversary, the band still seems in search of some lost song or symphony. This book highlights an artistic imagination in Yes’s finest moments that defies ready-made labels. It illustrates the capacity of honest musical appreciation to remake us, rather than simply to confirm our prejudices. The author asks why Yes music has elicited such intense devotion and opprobrium. He reconsiders the band’s musical creativity, variety and value – plotting a course through the commercial fads and critical fashions that have sometimes trapped it.

232 pages, Paperback

Published February 26, 2018

About the author

Simon Barrow is Director of the beliefs, ethics and politics think-tank Ekklesia. From 2000 to 2005 he was assistant general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, the official ecumenical body. He has written and contributed to numerous books, editing Scotland 2021 and A Nation Changed? The SNP and Scotland Ten Years On (with Gerry Hassan - Luath Press, 2017). He is also co-founder and chair of the Scottish Football Supporters Association, and lives in Leith, having relocated to Scotland from England in 2010.

Reviews

[Charles Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful guide to the music of Yes. I greatly enjoyed his examinations of the early, classic Yes albums, but the author made me listen afresh to some of the later songs that I had never found value in until now.

[Mike O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly a must for any hardcore Yes fan, but probably of interest to any serious lover of challenging music. Contains the best appreciation, and defense, of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, in which I also share the writer’s esteem for that double album epic. The only demerit I might be tempted to give it is not enough attention paid to 90125, which even if it doesn’t reach the artistic heights of the early 70’s output, is still of monumental importance to the band as it ensured its second half century of continuance.