guitarworld interview

[soundchaser09]

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/billy-sherwood-yes-best-worst-albums

[John Vehadija]

Thank you for this! : ) Open Your Eyes is still great, nice to see him reflecting back

[Gilly Goodness]

oooooo... DBAR is gonna think Christmas came early when he sees this....




ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING

[bondegezou]

https://www.guitarworld.com/features...t-worst-albums

Interesting that Sherwood, while defending Open Your Eyes to an extent, acknowledges that some songs on it were poor. I'd not seen him do that before.

[Homemade Parachute]

Interesting that Sherwood, while defending Open Your Eyes to an extent, acknowledges that some songs on it were poor.

So that's at least one plus the ambient track, or…?

[downbyariver]

oooooo... DBAR is gonna think Christmas came early when he sees this....

Yeah. This was pretty cool. I especially liked that they went back to Nomadic Sands (From Sherwood's first band, Lodgic), which is rare in Sherwood interviews. Seeing him pick a couple of favorite songs off World Trade (World Trade's first self-titled album) was also pretty neat.

One thing I find with Billy sometimes is that, for whatever reason, and this may just be the questions he gets asked in interviews or the way the conversations drift in podcasts, he doesn't really talk much about his own back catalog in interviews and other public conversations available online, so this was refreshing in that respect.

I would have loved to have seen Lodgic do another album back in the 80s. I felt like that was the closest thing Sherwood did to a pure 80s type album. It also, is in a way, the closest Yes ever came to being produced by David Foster (Not the guy from The Warriors, the superstar producer). Clearly, Lodgic is not Yes, and Foster was not the producer of record on Nomadic Sands, but Sherwood would go on to be in Yes, Jimmy Haun would go on to play guitar on most of a Yes album (Union), and Foster was apparently popping in and out of the room and offering a lot of feedback and suggestions while producing an album for another group next door. It was also to my knowledge Sherwood's first association with Toto (As the article mentions, two of their members produced the album), a band he would eventually go on to co-write a song for ("The Other Side", from Kingdom of Desire- You can also hear Billy sing it himself on Billy Sherwood and Tony Kaye's Live in Japan.), and with an ex-member of which he would create Yoso, which included a new album, a psuedo-live album, and at least one tour.

Anyway, as it regards this interview, it would have been nice to see some questions about upcoming projects- reportedly Sherwood has both a solo album and a Circa: album he's working on- and maybe some digging about Asia and Yes in general (No one has asked him why he was replaced as Asia's lead singer while continuing as it's bass player, and I'd like to see someone try to find a way to approach asking about new albums for both Asia and Yes that might reveal what the dynamics are behind the scenes in terms of who pushes for them and who blocks or delays them and how he would handle things if he were running them. I think we can probably guess at the answers to all of those things, but I don't think anyone has ever gotten him to articulate them on the record, so we don't really know.).

Still, they covered some pretty cool stuff.

This is my favorite song from Nomadic Sands, though Billy didn't mention it in the interview:

[bondegezou]

in a way, the closest Yes ever came to being produced by David Foster (Not the guy from The Warriors, the superstar producer). Clearly, Lodgic is not Yes, and Foster was not the producer of record on Nomadic Sands, but Sherwood would go on to be in Yes, Jimmy Haun would go on to play guitar on most of a Yes album (Union), and Foster was apparently popping in and out of the room and offering a lot of feedback and suggestions while producing an album for another group next door.

(This) David Foster and Jon Anderson collaborated on a song for the "St Elmo's Fire" soundtrack, http://www.relayer35.com/Yescography/stelmosf.htm