And You And I Yes

And You and I Album: Close to the Edge (1972)
by Yes

"And You and I" is the second track from the album Close to the Edge. The song is just over ten minutes in length and consists of four movements. The first and second parts of the song were released as a single edit and reached number 42 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Introducing the song live in 1972, lead vocalist Jon Anderson said Yes called it "The Protest Song" when they were making the Close to the Edge album.

The song was based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, a three-book science series in which the protagonist, Hari Seldon, is a mathematician who invents a new field called psychohistory, which could predict the course of history based on a mathematical analysis of the emotional state of the people of the universe - emotion revealed as the ocean maid. Throughout the course of the history covered by the books, merchants, and later, religious, take over control of society, only to both eventually fail - coins and crosses never know their fruitless worth. The series is also a mystery, where the central unknown is the location of one of the two Foundation planets of a spiral galaxy where the psychohistorians that guide the future of civilization reside - a foundation left to create the spiral aim. Knowing the song, I was able to determine the location of the first foundation before it was revealed in the third book. Many of the elements of the song fit the story, enough for those intrigued to pick up the books.

Written by band members Jon Anderson, Bill Bruford, Steve Howe and Chris Squire, this song runs 10:08 and is divided into four parts:

I) Cord of Life
II) Eclipse
III) The Preacher the Teacher
IV) Apocalypse

A 5:45 edit was released as a single and charted at #42 in the US.

In an interview with Jon Anderson, he answered: "Probably God. Or it could be we collectively. The audience and I, collectively we look for reality of being a true understanding of the beauty of life. We reach over the rainbow for an understanding of things. You and I climb closer to the light."

Few titles start with the word "and"; a more logical title would be "You And I." Jon Anderson told us why the conjunction appears at the beginning: "I sang it that way as I was writing it with Steve (Howe) and it just stuck: 'And you and I climb over the sea to the valley.' It's all about the reasons that we have to call our connection with the Divine. So it was something that just rhythmically worked."

Rick Wakeman, who played keyboards on this track, said, "It has different movements which all go into each other. The object was having a piece of music that was everything that the Yes critics hated us for and the Yes fans loved us for, which was emotion."

This was a highlight of the band's live shows, and one of their favorites to play in concert. The Close To The Edge album was conceived with live performance in mind, which was prescient considering they were still performing it more than 40 years later.

They played it start-to-finish along with The Yes Album and Going for the One on a tour that spanned March 2013 - June 2014. When the group resumed touring in July, they once again played the full album, this time along with Fragile.

In a 2014 interview with Chris Squire, he said: "The audiences respond real well to hearing the music in that format. It reminds them of when they first heard probably what was a vinyl album."