Song Notes: The progressive rock band Yes has had as much musical influence on me as Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Chopin, Thelonious Monk, and Joni Mitchell. I recorded a prog rock album, Audiocracy, which displays that influence directly, but I wanted to express a more intimate homage to their lead singer, Jon Anderson, and include one of his gentle masterpieces in this collection. I chose something from the Yes album titled Anderson, Wakeman, Bruford and Howe. (Since bass player Chris Squire did not play on that album, it doesn't carry the "Yes" name.)

The two songs that end the A and B sides of Anderson, Wakeman, Bruford and Howe are both gorgeous, simple songs reminiscent of Jon Anderson's collaborations with Vangelis (of Chariots Of Fire fame). I liked the melody to The Meeting better, yet the lyrics to Let's Pretend were the ones I wanted to present. So I went with a combination. The opening instrumental is my arrangement of The Meeting, using those New Age chords I employ so often when improvising on my piano after dinner. It is also a fitting prelude to Let's Pretend, serving as a kind of back story, a history of the first stages of a relationship. Falling in love revisted through memory, made precious and gentle through the prism of time and accumulative happiness.

The original lyrics to Let's Pretend were too overtly religious for me. The religious nature took away from the intimate sense I wanted to convey. I wanted this to be a personal statement to Suzanne, my wife. I wanted it to sound as if it came from me, alone. Also, I had always thought Jon was singing "I lay down unafraid," not "and I pray." I didn't change that lyric on purpose, I just heard and remembered it wrong. But I would never have used this song without that mistake, so I'm glad it happened just the way it did.

If I could pick one song from this collection to be played at my funeral, it would be this. Followed by Oh Danny Boy. Let's Pretend keeps the Great Illusion of Immortality alive until the very last breath, making it a kind of pact of love, a statement of hope beyond hope, a belief in this moment, without melancholy or self-pity. The paradox of trascendence. As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

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