Jon Anderson Reveals Why He Feared Another 'Roundabout' and How Yes Kept Changing

The conversation began with 1000 Hands, a 2019 album crowded with guest players, but Jon Anderson quickly steered it toward a much older tension. Sitting in a midtown Manhattan hotel, he revisited the years when Yes was moving fast, changing members often, and trying not to let one hit song define everything that came next.

A modern album that points back to the old band

Even the record that brought Anderson to the interview carried a reminder of how deeply his history with Yes still runs. Although 1000 Hands is billed as a Jon Anderson studio album, he described a project built with so many collaborators that calling it purely solo would miss the point. The guest list includes several musicians closely tied to Yes at different stages, among them the late bassist Chris Squire, longtime guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, keyboardist Rick Wakeman and guitarist Trevor Rabin.

That lineup says a great deal on its own. The album gathers figures from across Anderson's long musical life, including players from the classic era most closely associated with songs such as Close to the Edge, Yours is No Disgrace and Roundabout. Instead of presenting himself as someone waiting for old glories to be revived by others, Anderson came across as someone still in motion, still assembling people, still making connections across decades of work.

That spirit also opened the door to a wider look back. What emerged was not a tidy story about a band marching in a straight line from triumph to triumph. Anderson talked about Yes as a group that was always in the middle of becoming something else, sometimes by choice, sometimes because it had little alternative.

Before the records, there was simply the urge to play

Anderson traced that restless quality back to the beginning. By the time he started Yes with Chris Squire, he said he had already spent five years in bands and had a strong sense of what he wanted from the musicians around him. His listening was broad. He pointed to Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, and also singled out the songwriting of Jimmy Webb and Randy Newman. When he and Squire first sat down together, one of the names they discussed was Paul Simon.

Those references matter because Anderson did not describe the early band as a carefully mapped plan to make records. His recollection was much more immediate. The initial goal was to rehearse, get out on the road and play gigs. Recording was not presented as the starting point. The band sound, in his telling, grew out of musicians working together and discovering whether the chemistry held.

That chemistry did not always hold. Anderson said the early albums already contained signs of imbalance inside the group. He described a process of spotting a problem, hoping it might develop in a better direction, talking it through and then, when it became clear something was not working, changing personnel. It was never easy, he said, because nobody begins with the hope of replacing people. But he presented those decisions as practical. If the flow is not there, the group either changes or spends its energy worrying about whether it can survive.

He also offered an explanation for why Yes may have felt less naturally settled than some other British bands of the period. Unlike groups rooted in one city, he said, Yes drew its members from different directions. He contrasted that with bands he saw as more locally bonded: the Animals from Newcastle, the Beatles from Liverpool, the Hollies from Manchester and the Rolling Stones built in London. In his view, Yes never had quite that same hometown camaraderie.

Each new member changed the shape of the band

The way Anderson tells it, the revolving lineup was not just a source of strain. It also repeatedly opened creative doors. He remembered Steve Howe's arrival as a jolt that snapped the band into place. Suddenly, he said, he had another voice to sing with, and the group had a guitarist whose range stretched far beyond straightforward rock. Anderson spoke of Howe as someone who could handle classical playing in the manner of Rodrigo, while also moving through jazz and rock.

That shift helped lead to The Yes Album and larger tours, but stability still did not last. Anderson said another imbalance became noticeable during touring, with one member not quite meeting the level the band needed. On the flight home at the end of that run, he recalled Howe and Squire coming to him about Tony Kaye. Anderson was already thinking of Rick Wakeman, whom they had seen about a month earlier. His version of events suggests a band that kept making difficult choices because standing still felt worse.

One departure affected him especially deeply. After what Anderson regarded as a breakthrough with Close to the Edge, drummer Bill Bruford decided to leave. Anderson said that hurt him badly at the time. He remembered asking himself what was wrong with the band if someone would walk away after an album he considered so important. Yet with distance, he said he came to see Bruford's move as the right one because Bruford was not happy then.

Alan White's arrival changed the mood again. Anderson described White's presence with obvious excitement, noting that he had played with John Lennon. For Anderson, that felt like a moment of grace rather than a setback, and then the band simply kept moving forward with the work in front of it.

The success that made him wary

For nostalgia-minded fans, the most revealing part of Anderson's look back may be the way he spoke about success itself. He said there was a fear inside those years that he had not really talked about before. After Yes scored with a hit album and the hit single Roundabout, management and the record company wanted another album along the same lines.

Anderson's answer was to push in the other direction. He said he did not want to make another Roundabout album and made clear that, mentally and musically, he wanted to move on. In his telling, repeating the formula would have ended the sense of adventure inside the band. It would have turned Yes toward what others expected rather than what the musicians themselves wanted to explore.

That refusal helps explain the speed and ambition of the period that followed. Anderson pointed out that Fragile and Close to the Edge were completed within the same 12 month span, and that the band also took Close to the Edge on tour in that stretch. He remembered the group as kicking hard at that point, working with the feeling that it was the band against the world.

It is a revealing way to hear him frame the classic era. The big songs remain, and so do the albums that filled arenas and defined a generation of rock listeners. But in Anderson's memory, the real story is not that Yes found a successful formula. It is that the band kept resisting one, even when the most obvious path would have been to repeat the thing that had already worked.