If you haven’t listened to Steve Howe outside of the records he has made with Yes, then you have been missing something extremely interesting, exotic, playful, soul-searching and even romantic; for Howe has been exploring guitar sounds since before puberty hit. A self-acknowledged Chet Atkins fanboy from the very beginning, Howe leapt into guitar wanting to find THAT sound while exerting his own personality into the chords. It led him into the banjo and mandolin and sitar and although those instruments, and others, have been woven into the fabric of Yes, it is on his solo albums that they absolutely come to life.
Howe’s previous solo album, 2011’s Time, was a brilliant collaboration between Howe and some old-school classical geniuses like Bach and the moods and textures they inspired in the originals Howe composed for it, from “King’s Ransom” to the almost peppy banjo-fueled “Orange.” And now the maestro has returned with Love Is, another journey into the psyche of Howe. Partly instrumental, partly with vocals, it’s a wonderful frolic through musical notes that remind you of his work in Yes while being enough of a step away to be different and satisfying. Pulling double-duties, Howe also sings, plays a variety of stringed instruments and percussion while son Dylan Howe adds drums and Yes-mate Jon Davison comes in with some alluring harmonies.
“I called the album Love Is because it hints at the central idea that love is important but also love of the universe and the ecology of the world is very important,” Howe explained in a press release upon the album’s announcement. “We are still destroying the planet and, I suppose, my songs show the yearning I have for the love of nature and how beauty, art and music all stem from nature. There is a theme about those things, love, beauty, ecology, nature and wonderful people.”
Howe made his first album with Yes, the band he is still with, in 1971, featuring his twangy ode to Atkins, “Clap,” “Starship Trooper” and “I’ve Seen All Good People.” Not too shabby for his first time out with a band that would become a legend in Progressive Rock and be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2017. In 1975, Howe released his debut solo album, Beginnings. He has also released albums with his early bands, Tomorrow and The Syndicats, as well as with Asia, GTR and ABWH. His most recent appearance was adding some guitar to the tune “Now & Again” on Jon Anderson’s new solo record.
Howe has been working on Love Is for a few years now – it officially comes out on Friday, July 31 – perfecting his compositions. “At some point, probably around two years ago, Dylan came down to Curtis’s [Schwartz, engineer] studio and we recorded the drums on some of the tracks. I could see a balance of five instrumental tracks and five songs and there was a feeling that it was an album, sitting there, looking at me.”
Glide caught up with Howe at his home in the West Country, enjoying a beautiful day and as he says, “Staying as positive as possible.”
You have a new album coming out. How long have you been working on it?
Well, my releases cover more current material and material that I’ve been holding back because I like it and I want to kind of get it right before I release it, so I keep it to myself. So some of it’s taken over ten years to finesse but while doing Yes and Asia and the Steve Howe Trio and solo shows in England and making records with Asia and Yes, I was making this in my backroom, if you like, partly in my studio, preparing the tracks for eventual development and basically it’s taken a long time. But I like to do that. I like being busy and maybe I thought occasionally I’d finished it and then I went back to it and said, well, that’s not quite right yet. So I basically wanted to get it very solid and get it on nice footing and get Dylan, my son, on drums. And also, of course, Jon Davison on vocals and bass. So all this took some maneuvering along the way and I insist on it being a pleasant experience as well.
Do the songs with lyrics take longer than the instrumentals?
Yeah, I guess they do really. A lot of things do happen quite quickly when I play a guitar but in songs and in construction and if you want it to kind of sit well with yourself and ultimately the audience, yeah, there is a little bit more development to go on and there is a little bit more looking at the lyrics and getting really confident with them. You like the way they sound and they tell enough of a story but also have some sort of secretive qualities to them too that I know more about than anybody else. But basically that’s because some songs can be, you know, just thrown in: This is the lyric I thought of and I’ll stick with it. Or you can craft the lyrics. I mostly craft lyrics so now more recently I tend to write lyrics separately from songs, from the tunes, and then I compile lyrics that I like into those songs.
Every song or tune I’ve written has really been constructed in a different way. They have a lot of different ways you can put music together and each one seems to have it’s own sort of methodology. With songs, they have more to consider because what you’re doing is working around the voice because the voice is going to be the key to that song and therefore a great opportunity to develop my guitar parts, as I do in a band, around the vocals. I love both.
How do your songs usually start?
Well, they all have different sort of events that make them happen but my usual pattern is that I do a lot of compiling of the small ideas and then I listen to them back and compile them in a way that they’re accessible for me so I can see what key they are in or what BPM they’re running at. Then I kind of piece parts together. That’s quite often how I do it. That doesn’t apply to all the songs here on Love Is but it’s more of the way of how I’ve been doing it over the last five or ten years.
Basically what happens, one afternoon I’m looking to do something and I think, Oh, I like this guitar part so what about a riff that goes with this or theme or chord structure, you know, and I’ll start developing it. It’s really far more complicated than it is because this becomes a natural process of creating titles. That’s something else I like doing, is titling music as well. But a song usually comes with a title somewhere in the lyrics so that’s certainly easier.
So yeah, that kind of construction, you need a bit of space to do that in and you need to do it in batches. So I tend to get going on looking back at some of my ideas and then I might come up with six songs or six guitar instrumentals, six tunes, from that. An instrumental might switch over and I’ll put a lyric to it. “Love Is A River” was one of them. But as I say, it’s like asking an artist where do you start your painting. Well, sometimes I start it at the top, sometimes I start it at the bottom, sometimes I start it with the ending, sometimes I don’t. There’s lots of different ways of constructing and there’s no particular strong pattern other than that one I described of getting lots of ideas and then looking back at them and being able to access them. That’s how I do it.
“Pause For Thought” is a wonderful piece with different textures to it
Yeah, that’s the thing, I suppose, I’m known for or I do, an orchestral approach to my guitars. Basically there is a conglomerate of acoustic and various other guitars that I use. So yeah, this is not a piece that’s trying to jump out at you, it’s a piece that’s trying to soothe you back and give you a moment of reflection, maybe about events. I like the title, it really glued into that track. It didn’t have to be called that because it’s an instrumental, it didn’t come with a title. I write titles down and then I review them and then think, what am I looking for here. Also, “Pause For Thought,” that’s the kind of title that goes with this tune.
There’s three sources of guitar but some are almost like synth guitar sounds so they make more than a regular guitar sound because they’ve a synthesis in them. Also, there’s my sitar guitar sound that I used on Close To The Edge and the early days of Yes and became one of my trademark sounds that I use, with steel guitar. So it’s got the hodgepodge of quite a few of my different guitar approaches. They sound different because they are different. They fundamentally give me a different opportunity to play.
So I mix things over but particularly important was the space where Dylan played on the drums and we were looking for a sort of part that he could play. It didn’t come easy and we developed that part where he kind of lays out the parts. It’s a bit like “Beyond The Call,” given that he really doesn’t come in for a while but when he does he adds the flavors and the textures we like. But then it gets full on towards the end of the song. And this one is kind of reverse really. He comes in fairly full on but then at the end he kind of twinkles out and smooths out. So it’s all serving the mood of the music very much.
When you first started playing guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
Well, I think for everybody the physical pressure you have to put on the strings and also whilst doing that you’ve got to make sure that pressure isn’t spilling out your finger onto the next string, otherwise that string will sound what we call dead. It’ll be blocked, it’ll be numb, you know. It won’t voice. So learning how to get your fingers to fit in the chords. But my basic approach was I didn’t understand guitar teachers at all and I didn’t know anybody who taught guitar and I didn’t really want to be taught. I wanted to discover it myself. So that self-discovery was a fairly slow initial progress even though after a couple of years I was playing pop songs with a band (laughs). So I knew that was quite a big thing, that I was making progress and I always felt if I’m not doing something good in ten years then maybe I shouldn’t have jumped on this. But funny enough, I was in Yes three years later (laughs). So I got that self-reward, if you like, of being in a group that I loved all the guys and respected them as musicians and it was a lot of fun. I worked with very powerful talent.
But in the initial stages, yeah, the fingering was obviously something to grapple with because I didn’t use tutors. I just referred to chord books, I loved chords, changing chords. The main thing I developed was determination to understand the fingerboard better but not through some sort of academic approach but really just learning about all these notes and how to use chord inversions. I guess most of the inspiration was from other great guitarists, particularly Chet Atkins, who was my number one guitarist, and a slew of other players. But Chet was the guy who showed me that you could be versatile on the guitar. You didn’t have to play one style. Particularly in the sixties, you had an awful lot of blues, everybody was playing blues and some people played it really well but I didn’t just want to stick with blues, I’d done it, I had done the blues band thing. I was moving ahead and I wanted to combine Jazz, classical, rock and I guess that’s what Progressive Rock really was.
When you were recording your first album with Yes, which guitar part do you recall fussing with the most, perhaps because of its difficulty?
Well, we had written most of The Yes Album out in the West Country of England and basically we went into the studio haven’t even played some of it on the stage. But when we went in there and played, we knew we wanted to make it sound much better than that first recording. What are we going to do here, what are we going to do there. So there was a lot of finessing. There were things that were like technically difficult and took a long time. There was one note in “Starship Trooper” that fades up just before Jon comes back in to sing and the guitar goes (singing note) while Chris is doing a lovely climb on his bass and I come in with this fade and that took about three hours (laughs). Some things took a long time. One note, three hours. But we had to get this note to sustain. We tried it this way, it didn’t sustain. We tried this and it didn’t sustain and we tried this and it didn’t sustain.
Basically, some of this was just great adventure, that’s what Eddie Offord [producer] and I enjoyed about recording together. It was an adventure to have and it was fun to try new things. Sometimes we’d record the guitar completely clean, cause a lot of my guitar is quite clean, and then later we’d put a flanger on it or something. So we’d mess it up later. I quite like that. But I would say the main challenges of difficulty were really just feeling good about improvising. I mean, that’s not so much difficult but it’s something you have to catch and something you have to get good with. But I wouldn’t say anything was that difficult on The Yes Album.
What do you consider was Chris Squire’s greatest gift to music?
It’s pretty obvious, you know. This guy played the bass in a very new kind of way. I met him in 1970. I’d run into him in the Flower Power days, just him coming off stage and me going onstage or something like that and giving each other a nod. Once I saw Chris playing in Yes, I could understand that it was really different to have so much originality and talent on the bass, you know, for a change. You expect it on the organ or the keyboards, the drums, it’s very important that it’s in the guitars and in the voice but not the bass. And Chris was an amazingly creative bass player. There was a small price. He was slow, he wouldn’t dream up those parts very quickly and we would have to kind of work with him but he was very much the perfectionist in the band and just an outstanding bass player.
Back in the sixties, I understand you played on something with drummer Aynsley Dunbar. What became of that?
I think it was a song called “She” by Keith West. That’s one of the only two released tracks. “The Kid Was A Killer” and a song called “On A Saturday,” and “She” may not have come out initially, but “On A Saturday” by Keith West did have Aynsley Dunbar and me on it. We had a string bass on “On A Saturday.” It was a beautiful song by Keith and I played Spanish Guitar, Aynsley Dunbar on drums and the stringed bass player. On the B-side, “The Kid Was A Killer,” I played the bass and the guitar and I think Aynsley is on that one as well. I had moved out of Tomorrow and Keith still had the contract with EMI and had some sessions to release some records, cause he’d had a big hit with a song called “Excerpt From A Teenage Opera.” So there was something going on, I loved studios and I stuck with Keith. Keith and I were good friends and that’s how we did that. But those are the titles I believe that Aynsley and I are on together. There were some other tracks that came out on a Keith West compilation so there were some other unreleased tracks that actually had Ronnie Wood playing bass on. I was on guitar, Ronnie Wood was on bass and Aynsley was on drums and Keith was singing. I think one of them was called “The Journey.”
But you know, Aynsley really should have been invited to play with Yes. Alan was so in-house when Bill Bruford told us he wanted to leave, which was fairly shocking, but basically Aynsley should have been asked because I knew Aynsley quite well. But Alan, we did know his personality, if you like, we were familiar with him and that made Alan work, click very well. But I think Aynsley would have liked to have been invited and would have appreciated being considered. But we were in a bit of a rush at the time.
You also play mandolin. What was the earliest Yes song you remember playing mandolin on?
I may have played it on Tomato, which is quite late in 1978. I think it’s an electric mandolin. But I think I had already used mandolins on the Beginnings album. I’m trying to think. I had used autoharp on “Turn Of The Century” – I’m working backwards in my mind (laughs). I’ll tell you what, on “The Gates Of Delirium,” there is mandolin but again it may have been electric or it may have been acoustic. So what’s the earliest Yes song with mandolin? It could have been on Relayer, there might be some on Topographic but on Beginnings there is quite a bit of mandolin.
I had been hooked on country before the whole of my life because before I started playing I heard Tennessee Ernie Ford and he had Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West as the guitar duo on his records, “Shotgun Boogie” and “Blackberry Boogie,” and those influenced me immensely; and of course, fifty years later, Alison Krauss & Union Station with Jerry Douglas on dobro. I’m an enormous fan of her work and their work. So yeah, country has always had a big thing with me. And Chet Atkins, he IS country (laughs). If you want to say who is in country, Chet had an enormous influence on the way country records were made and of course his country picking guitar. He’s what inspired me to play “Clap” and about twenty other tunes in that style. But yeah, mandolin, it’s a lovely thing.
You end your new album with “On The Balcony.” What is your message in that song?
Yeah, out of all the songs, that one could have started the album. It’s more like an expected song, it’s got certain ingredients, it’s very riff orientated. But yeah, the idea of the song really, when you’ve been in thousands of hotels like I have, getting out of the four walls, which is rather reminiscent of a prison cell, onto a balcony certainly alleviates one’s feeling of intense enclosure. So it’s a step out where you go and it’s somewhere that there’s two versions: there’s the balcony in a noisy city that you go out on and it’s got the drone and the noise and sirens blaring; then there’s the kind of Hawaiian balcony that you walk out on and it’s peaceful and beautiful. I would say it’s more like the Hawaiian balcony. Over the years I’ve stayed in enough hotels that I always ask for a balcony. I always felt that was a nice thing to have.
Then later in the song I talk about it in a different light, which is stages, which are quite like a balcony, and it’s reversed cause people are looking at you and if you’re not ready it’s too late (laughs). It’s way too late to be ready. And that’s my kind of general approach: get ready for the things you’ve got to do in your music, otherwise, it’s too late. When you need it, it’s not there. That’s a fun song and I like the fact that it’s got this kind of tight lyric and Dylan flares up a lot and of course Jon Davison on the bass and vocals. It’s a satisfying track. I wanted to go out more with a bang than a fizzle (laughs). This song kind of bangs out and I think that was my general approach to the album, that it should be strong and solid.
Live photographs by Leslie Michele Derrough
