A castle in Carimate, Italy, was supposed to fix everything. Yes had rented the place in 1985 to force closeness, to make the follow-up to 90125 feel like a band effort again. Trevor Horn was producing, and the logic seemed sound: isolate five musicians, remove distractions, let the chemistry return. What actually happened inside those stone walls became one of the most unproductive stretches in the group's history.
Big Generator, the twelfth studio album from the English progressive rock group Yes, emerged from that experiment in forced collaboration. The sessions began with a fracture: Trevor Horn deliberately excluded vocalist Jon Anderson from the initial writing and rehearsal period. Anderson, the voice that had defined the band's identity for nearly two decades, was kept outside the room while the others shaped the material.
A pressure cooker in Italy
The atmosphere curdled quickly. Horn's decision fed a growing tension between Trevor Rabin and Jon Anderson, two strong-willed songwriters pulling the music in opposite directions. Rabin wanted the sleek, commercially oriented pop sound that had made 90125 a global success. Anderson kept reaching back toward the sprawling progressive rock structures of the 1970s. The castle, meant to unite them, became a pressure cooker.
Production eventually moved to London after creative differences made the Italian sessions untenable. The relocation did not resolve the underlying friction. Yes spent roughly two years wrestling with the material, a period marked by toxic interpersonal dynamics and a mounting sense that the band might not survive the album it was trying to make.
The album that emerged
What finally emerged on September 21, 1987, via Atco Records, was a record split between two impulses. Big Generator carried the glossy pop rock and new wave textures of its predecessor, but it also contained extended compositions like "I'm Running" and "Shoot High, Aim Low" that reached back to the progressive rock ambition of the previous decade. The album became the last collection of original material Yes would release for Atco.
The lineup remained intact: Jon Anderson on vocals, Trevor Rabin on vocals, guitars, and keyboards, Tony Kaye on keyboards and organ, Chris Squire on bass and vocals, and Alan White on drums. It was the final studio album of the 1980s to feature Anderson, and the last time this particular configuration of Yes would complete a full record of new songs.
Singles and deeper cuts
The singles carried the commercial weight. "Love Will Find a Way," written by Rabin, found its way onto the charts, as did "Rhythm of Love." Both tracks leaned into the polished radio-ready sound that had defined 90125. Meanwhile, the deeper cuts gestured elsewhere, creating an album that felt less like a unified statement than a negotiation between two versions of what Yes could be.
The commercial response was respectable but not transformative. On November 14, 1987, Big Generator landed at position 15 on the Billboard 200. Sales surpassed two million copies worldwide — a strong number, yet far below what 90125 had achieved. The record existed in an awkward space: too pop for progressive rock purists, too strange for casual listeners who only wanted another "Owner of a Lonely Heart."
Thirty-nine years later, the question Big Generator raises has never really been answered. What happens when a band's internal contradictions are precisely what make its music interesting — but also precisely what make it unsustainable? The album documents a group that could not agree on what it wanted to be, and somehow turned that disagreement into a record people still argue about. Whether that counts as triumph or survival remains unresolved.
The album documents a group that could not agree on what it wanted to be, and somehow turned that disagreement into a record people still argue about.
The horn section on "Almost Like Love" — James Zavala, Lee R. Thornburg, Nick Lane, and Greg Smith — added a texture unlike anything else in the Yes catalog. And Zavala's harmonica on "Love Will Find a Way" remains one of the strangest small details in the band's discography. Big Generator ends not with resolution but with a lingering sense of paths not taken, of a version of Yes that might have existed had the castle sessions gone differently.