Song from My Youth

Yes – Close To The Edge

They don’t make music like this anymore. I’m glad I grew up with such good music.

Meaning of the Lyrics from Wikipedia:

In a May 27, 1996 interview with Elizabeth Gips on her show “Changes” (KKUP, Cupertino, CA), transcribed in the “Notes From the Edge” fanzine (issue #0159, August 23, 1996), Jon Anderson mentions, probably not for the first time, that the song—indeed, the whole album—is inspired by Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha. “[We] did one album called Close to the Edge. [It] was based on the Siddhartha… You always come back down to the river. [You] know, all the rivers come to the same ocean. That was the basic idea. And so we made a really beautiful album[….]”

This explanation can cast the cryptic and mysterious lyrics in a new light, tracking the awakening of Hesse’s character “close to the edge” of a river (and, symbolically, of the serial lifetimes of his soul) where he experiences a spiritual awakening. According to that point of view, the lyrics are about how people can seek spiritual illumination, and find a new state of mind, living a whole life. In addition, Anderson was also concerned about how the words sounded, sometimes more than what they meant, creating, thus, verses that often don’t seem to mean anything, such as “The time between the notes relates the colour to the scenes”.

Musical Monday
Monday’s Music Moves Me

Today I am grateful for classic rock

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