After hearing that Tull’s album “Aqualung” was being regarded as a concept album despite that he insisted that it wasn’t, Anderson decided to give them “the mother of all concept albums”. It took a facetious Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull to take the next big step and create the single-song album. UFO had really pushed the physical limits of the disc. The grooves of a vinyl disc could only be etched so close together otherwise the stylus would pick up “echoes” from the adjacent grooves. Still, there were spatial limitations to filling one side of an album. UFO created the space guitar epic “Flying”, which not only cleared 26 minutes but surprisingly shared side two with another shorter track. Bob Dylan’s “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” filled an entire side of an album but was only 11:22. To fill an entire side of an album with one song usually meant writing a piece around 20 minutes long. For the following album, Yes returned to the formula of “Close to the Edge”, writing one long song for side one and two 10-minute songs for side two.
As such, there are mixed opinions about the music with some people claiming most of the songs fail to be as concise as “Close to the Edge” and could have been better were they shorter. However, the task of making each song stretch to the 20-minute mark sometimes forced the band to come up with ideas to throw in. So as not to bury themselves in repetition, each song featured a different approach to composition, thus avoiding an album of four “Close to the Edges”. Inspired by their success, the next album “Tales from Topographic Oceans” was a double-disc release with just four songs, each one occupying the entire side of a disc. The resulting album with its 18-minute plus title track raced to the top five in both Britain and the U.S.A. When Jon Anderson and Steve Howe of Yes began work on “Close to the Edge”, they approached the song as a suite with four movements. Particularly in classical music, the symphony and the suite were long and complex compositions that were comprised of movements. Tales from Topographic Oceans – Two discs, four songsīefore the advent of the record album, music was written and performed to the length seen as appropriate by the composer or in some cases by the performer.
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