Yes Featuring Anderson Rabin Wakeman Release New Song, ‘Fragile’
Yes Featuring Anderson Rabin Wakeman guitarist Trevor Rabin has revealed a new song with an old title from the prog-rock giants.
The new track, “Fragile” (which shares its name with Yes’ classic 1972 album), aired on Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones’ radio show Jonesy’s Jukebox, and has now been uploaded to YouTube, though unofficially.
The track, which features both Rabin and Jon Anderson on vocals, was produced by Rabin and initially appeared in a different form over the end credits of the TNT series Agent X in 2015. According to Rabin, Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman heard the song and expressed interest in doing something with it. "So we thought, 'Yeah, let's do it,’” Rabin told Jones, “so we did it."
You can hear “Fragile” below.
The track bears several hallmarks of Anderson/Rabin-era Yes (the lineup was heard on such records as 90125, Big Generator and Talk), from the vocal harmonies and Rabin’s rich layers of guitars to the relative brevity of the track (a less-than-epic 5:22). The lyrics are predictably abstract (“Time to recover / All things must pass / Look to another / Casting the cast”) but may reveal a deeper meaning over time.
According to Prog, there is uncertainty over whether the song is complete and mixed, or whether it is still a work in progress. As the band reported earlier this year (upon announcing the impending release of the Yes, 50th Anniversary Live at the Apollo album and DVD), it's working on a new album to be released late in 2018 or 2019.
Rabin told us the band has “a ton of categorized pieces which we have together, and it’s just taking a long time to put it all together. But I think it’s going to result in something pretty special if we have the patience to get through it!"
Yes Featuring Anderson Rabin Wakeman will embark on the U.S. leg of their Quintessential Yes: The 50th Anniversary Tour, beginning Aug. 26 at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.