Steve Howe really likes making music. This year will mark the 60th anniversary of the 1964 recording debut he made as a 17-year-old on a cover of the Chuck Berry standard “Maybellene” that was produced by storied English record producer/sound engineer Joe Meek (more on that later). Howe, of course, is best known for his role as the guitarist/songwriter/producer for Yes, a position he’s occupied since April 1970 when he auditioned to replace founding member and fellow string-bender Peter Banks.
This August finds the latest iteration of the quintet arriving in the states to join Deep Purple on a month-long tour. Ostensibly, Yes will be touring in support of the Howe-produced “Mirror To the Sky,” the band’s 23rd studio outing. Following on the heels of 2021’s “The Quest,” “Mirror To the Sky” took a year-and-a-half to record. When asked for the inspiration behind this latest collection of songs, Howe was very matter of fact.
“Well, we like recording,” he said with a laugh during an interview. “We like to get our songs lined up like ducks on a pond. We just enjoy the process of trying to make great Yes music and basically, messages are in the songs. You know there’s stuff in there about different topics, not least of all love, affection, kindness and the bigger picture of the world being in crisis, I suppose. There is a little of everything. There’s a human factor here.”
Heralded by many fans as a return to form for the band, “Mirror To the Sky” hits plenty of high marks from the ethereal “Luminosity,” which clocks in at nearly 10 minutes long, to the subtle acoustic ballad “Circles of Time” and its musings on mortality. Elsewhere, opening cut “All Connected” binds together darting string arrangements, bassist Billy Sherwood’s nimble bass playing and Geoff Downes’ swirling synth runs, while Jon Davison leads with airy vocal phrasing reminiscent of founding member Jon Anderson.
With a half-century-plus worth of recordings in the can, there’s plenty to choose from in the Yes canon. But when pressed to share what fans can expect when the band pulls into town, Howe was cheerfully secretive about what songs would be populating the set list.
“Basically, we pick from albums and try and freshen our set,” he explained. “We’ve got a selection and a process and we’re going to throw in a couple of new songs. Basically, we think we know how to make a Yes set. It involves light and shade, fast and slow, loud and quiet. It’s what we always want to do.”
Like many Yes albums, “Mirror To the Sky” features cover art by Roger Dean, whose history with the band dates back to his initial commission to create the cover for the 1971 album “Fragile.” His art has been a cornerstone of the band’s brand up to and including his designing the band logo, which has been in use since debuting on 1972’s “Close To the Edge.” Dean’s seminal role is well-recognized by Howe.
“[Roger’s role in Yes is] ginormous but it’s covered by one word—vision,” Howe said. “A band has a sort of imaginary potential to have a visual kind of floating ideas around them and you can say that Pink Floyd had the pig floating. What we’ve done is use Roger’s landscaping and scaffolding [that finds him using enormous] space like [he does with the album cover of] ‘Mirror To the Sky. ’It’s very sort of space-like and very naturalistic. A lot of his ideas are drawn from actual nature in earth as we know it. But Roger takes inspiration from inventing even more obscure and unusual tangents of possibility. Is this possible to have the water over the top or the sky below? Roger has broken all the rules.”
Howe’s own path to guitar virtuosity started when he was 13 and first heard Chet Atkins.
“I’d bought a record called ‘Teensville,’ because it had a guitar hanging on the front in the picture and I just happened to notice who this guy was. Chet Atkins? And that was it,” he said.
The aforementioned studio debut with Meek also did plenty to shape Howe’s musical views on the technical side of the coin.
“Basically, Joe was my introduction to production,” Howe said. “Music is subtle and things get inside of you that you don’t know and production did. I noticed what he was doing and I hear it now in his sound. He was the first guy—it was kind of loopy. What’s the first experience like with your first girlfriend? You just don’t know. Joe was the first producer. He got bossy occasionally and got mad. He got very creative. He added delays on my guitar and he was a designer of sound. I think it was a fair enough introduction.”
Howe spent the next six years following a winding musical path that found him doing stints in the soul covers band The In Crowd and psychedelic rockers Tomorrow as well as jamming with Jimi Hendrix and sharing bills with Pink Floyd on the London club circuit and auditioning for the likes of Atomic Rooster (whose drummer was future Asia bandmate Carl Palmer) and The Nice. But it was with Yes where Howe codified his creative self and in the process, played a major role in the band’s incredible and ongoing history.
“Music is a sensitive art, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, you want to be able to get your idea across as well and help them get their idea across—that’s the teamwork of music,” he said. “Belief is not something that you’re going to start out with, but as soon as you can latch onto anything that gives you that belief—basically (you’re) convincing yourself that what you’re doing is right. But proving that, when you need to, it’s about a cumulative experience and practice. They say 10 years on an instrument and you might be somewhere and that’s exactly where I got, somewhere and 10 years was when I wound up in Yes. That belief had to weather the storms of desperation—not having any money and sticking to my art, not just for art’s sake, but because I wanted to make a career of it.”
Howe added, “The longevity is about perseverance, love, enjoyment, fellowship and friendship. Music has to be made in that kind of an atmosphere, for me anyway. I paid my dues in different sorts of bands—10 of them in fact. And basically, I’ve learned a little bit about it. I apply all the good things I’ve learned to Yes right now.”
