First is Jon's interview (with its' colorful cover proclaiming him Prog God for 2016) in the August issue of PROG (on sale as of yesterday) - which is primarily devoted to a retrospective of his career as well as recent events (i.e. Anderson/Stolt and ARW). Page 49 features an article on the topic of our favorite trio...
A new album is in the works, still being tweaked as we speak. How's it coming together?
"It's really really good!" says Anderson delightedly.
What can Anderson reveal about the new music?On the live show:
"I heard it...Trevor's done some power-rock tracks for some of the record; it's really bananas. They work, you know. Then I put some ideas on them...so it became furious, cinematic. There's long-form material too. Oh it goes from one extreme to another!"
"It'll be a mix of Yes music and our new material. I can hear everything in my head...it's a question of pooling your energies together to make it work the very best we can. And in a way I don't want it to be too like Yes: we want to use a more 21st-century sound, which, given new technology, is how we record."Rick's interview with Mike Ragogna of The Huffington Post (who also interviewed Trevor in 2012) was posted yesterday as well, and he offers some interesting tidbits.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yes-its-arw-and-more-conversations-with-rick-wakeman_us_5783bb2ae4b0f06648f56378
On the subject of the album:
As soon as it leaked out what we were doing, it was nuts. We had lots of offers from various record labels. “Oh, come and make an album.” It’s very tempting to say, “Yeah, great, let’s make an album,” but we sat down and said, “This is doing it for the wrong reasons.” Yes, we’ve all got music, we’ve been throwing music back and forth towards each other with ideas of things we want to do and there is some great stuff. But we decided what’s best is to go out and play together and really get to know each other again. We’ll continue the writing during the tour, and after the tour, we can do some more recording, put some more tracks together. We may do it as a CD EP, we may do it as a single track, we may do it as an album, but we’ll be doing it for the right reasons when the music is ready.
I’m coming over to see Trev in the beginning of August to put some keys down on a couple of tracks that we’ve been working on. If they’re ready in time, we may well do one in time, we may release it as a single piece, I don’t know. But what we’re not doing is we’re not going down the old road of, “Oh, you’ve got to make an album before you tour.” No, we don’t have to do that at all. We can go out, play music, maybe include some new stuff, certainly throw in some new surprises and certainly some new arrangements of some of the classic Yes material. The great thing about rules―and there always have been rules in the rock world, “first you make an album, then you tour”―is that they’re there to be broken. The most important thing that we’ve all agreed on is that whatever we do, it has to be done for the right reason. It wouldn’t be the right reason just to run into a studio and knock out an album. At the end of the day, after a tour, we all go, “You know what? We could’ve done that so much better.”Rick states that the North American tour has been extended into December and interestingly enough the official site has been taken offline again, presumably to make those updates to the schedule. He also noted: "We’re looking at this as a relatively long-term plan, at least three if not four or five years." which certainly makes for interesting future speculation in terms of what ARW is looking to accomplish on the touring/recording fronts, as well as how all of it will impact Trevor's workload in other areas.
