Jon Anderson has been a mainstay on the prog scene since the late 1960s. His voice and songwriting skills with Yes, the band he started with Chris Squire in ’68, were integral parts of the emergence of prog rock, and they helped Yes become prog overlords in the 1970s. Initially released in 1997, Earth Mother Earth, his twelfth solo album and second in the same year, is now being reissued by Frontiers Music Srl. At the time of the album’s original release, Jon Anderson was just emerging from the health issues which had hampered his ability to sing and had seen him leaving Yes.
This is largely an acoustic, folky unplugged album. Most of the songs include the sounds of nature and feature Anderson gently strumming an acoustic guitar with his wife Jane, a fair singer herself, accompanying him on vocals or singing the occasional lead on tracks like ‘Heaven Knows (Tree Hugging)’. She also recites poetry on the short track ‘Behind My Eyes’, and there are contributions from daughters Jade and Deborah, who sing backing vocals on ‘Time Has Come’. The album is a glimpse into Anderson‘s soul, a world having a close affinity with nature, with his hippy and spiritual leanings well to the fore, one which is far removed from the fantasy world of Topographic Oceans. On Yes tours, band members would occasionally get the opportunity to perform a solo spot — Steve Howe‘s ‘The Clap’ came out of this — and this album could almost be seen as an extended Anderson solo spot.
Earth Mother Earth is a stripped down and, basically, gentle album, featuring none of the complexity or multi-layering of a Yes album. The bird and cat sounds are never overdone, and Anderson shows his age on ‘Scraggle Cat’ by referencing Pussy Cat Willum, a puppet cat from late 1950s children’s TV. Other tracks reference flowers, nature and oceans, particularly on ‘Whale Watching’, Anderson‘s plea to save the whale, with his impassioned voice making this the nearest thing to a Yes track on the album. The three ‘Harptree’ tracks are all short acoustic pieces, while ‘Take A Little Time Out’ is sung to a background of running water and evokes the feel of a Cat Stevens song. Anderson lays out his philosophy on title track ‘Earth Mother Earth’ when he sings “we all live together, we belong together, this mother earth and us.”
Anderson‘s world is a harmonious and, dare I say it, a simplistic one, a world you don’t need the Keys To Ascension to enter, just a desire to want to live in sync with nature. How much more peaceful the world would be if people like Jon Anderson were in charge. You may say he’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one.
