Love And A Wonderous Story
“Solo albums have to be fun from the word go. You’re doing your own album and you can do what the hell you like.”
“All my solo albums have given pleasure in particular ways because none of them have been a headache,” asserts a jovial Steve Howe with a wry laugh. “Nobody got cross, everyone got paid, I walked away with a smile and the label were happy. You don’t always get that with group albums. You get internal problems, disagreements, different directions and people walking out. They’re quite hellish. Solo albums are not allowed to be like that. Solo albums have to be under my control but all fun from the word go. You’re doing your own album and you can do what the hell you like.”
Such sentiments do, of course, merely hint at some of the indoctrinated chaos that has blighted Yes over many decades. Indeed, there rarely seems to be any extended hiatus from the internal politics, splits, line-up alterations and public recriminations that have constantly distracted from their music. It’s not tricky then to determine that the source of Howe’s carefree demeanour is that we’re discussing his new solo album, the uplifting Love Is, his first solo release in almost a decade. A delay that, for someone as musically prolific and creative as Howe, seems almost inconceivable.
“Well, I’ve basically been very busy,” he explains. “In that time period, I’ve made at least one record with Yes, two with Asia, released a Steve Howe Trio album [2019’s ], done four solo tours, toured with Yes and also with Asia. I have also not been in any hurry. Nobody is knocking on my door saying: ‘Quick, give me a new solo album’. So that gave me a chance to mature a record and go off into different areas of writing. It also means I can get some finesse into it, put a stamp on it and make sure that I really, really like it. Quite often with an album, you can really think that you’re finished and that you’re really happy. You then leave the session and you go, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this now’ but when you play it, you can think ‘Well, I don’t know.’ You can think that you’re finished many times but if you have the space to come back to a record after a week or two, or even a couple of months, you hear it differently. I wanted to make sure that it had all the ingredients. If you have high expectations for your own project, then you really don’t want to compromise. I was totally uncompromising on this record and wanted to get it finished, with a capital ‘F’.”
