The 1983 hit song that killed prog icons Yes: “I was ready to leave”
The story of every fall from grace begins with success. There are more tales than can be committed to words about bands and artists who got a taste of the high life and wouldn’t stop chasing another mouthful, losing themselves in the process.
This happened with Yes, much to the disdain of lead singer Jon Anderson, with the song ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.
The irony is that many bands spend their entire careers chasing the kind of breakthrough Yes achieved in the 1980s. Yet for artists who built their reputation on experimentation and musical freedom, massive commercial success could sometimes feel strangely suffocating.
Yes were already a successful band when it came to the release of their 1983 album 90125, making a lot of prog rock that was generally well-received. 90125 ushered in a new period for the group, as they ventured further into pop and had their first hit single with ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’. The track was the first one by the band to reach number one. While this was a significant milestone for the outfit, it was also a double-edged sword, one that their record label used to cut them down.
That tension between artistic ambition and commercial expectation became one of the defining struggles of Yes’ later years. The more successful the band became on mainstream radio, the more pressure there was to repeat the formula that had delivered those results.
“We were scrambling to make a hit record, and the record company and management were all they talked about.”
Jon Anderson
‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ showed Yes’ label that the band could write number-one hits. After that, creative integrity was thrown out the window as making more and more hits became their number one priority. This frustrated all the members, but none more than lead singer Jon Anderson, who had little involvement in the original track ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.
“By the time we got to Big Generator,” he said, an album released by Yes in 1987. “I was ready to leave because nobody was happy. We were scrambling to make a hit record, and the record company and management were all they talked about. They’d play records and say, ‘This is a hit record, make something like this.’”
Very few artists start making music with success at the forefront of their minds; they do so with a love of said music, so it can be hard to write something with any passion when that initial love is eclipsed by success. The idea of the band being shown music written by other artists and then told to mimic it as much as possible is enough to make anyone fall out of love with their art, which happened to Anderson and the rest of the group.
They still tried to write, though, and the follow-up to their hit single was ‘Leave It’, a track that did well but failed to find the same legs that ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ did. However, Anderson still looks back and enjoys the music video process, as they made 19 different versions and only submitted one. “Something that’s abstract, you can look at it now and think ‘That’s a damn good video,’ because it is different.”
It’s great when a band finds the success they deserve, and sometimes this takes time; however, once that success comes, no matter how long it has taken to get there, some people misconstrue it and think it must be replicated as quickly as possible. This happened with Yes and their record label, leading members to lose passion for what they were creating and Yes’ ultimate demise.
In hindsight, ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ became both a blessing and a curse for the band. It introduced Yes to a far larger audience than ever before, but it also shifted expectations in a way that permanently altered their relationship with success, creativity and each other.
