“I said, ‘What do you mean, evacuate now? I just ordered my hors d’oeuvres!’” The twists of fate pushing Jon Anderson to finish his next projects – even if they take 30 years
Jon Anderson recently released his 16th solo album, True . While the former Yes singer told Prog about that project with The Band Geeks , he also outlined some of the other works he's hoping to send into the world soon.
Jon Anderson is well known for being involved in a wide variety of different undertakings, some of which can take many years to come to fruition. One such project is his long-gestating musical, Marc Chagall: The Color Of Love, which seems to have moved forward due to a happy accident that grew out of a time of tragedy.
"The year was 1982," Anderson tells Prog. "I was in the south of France and I met Marc Chagall, the artist [who died in 1985], and I wrote a musical about his life. I remember him saying, 'Yes, Jon, it sounds like your idea is good – but it'll take a long time.' I said, 'No, I'm recording at the moment. I'll get it done this year.' In the end, it took more than 30 years to finish it.
"It was a slow process, grabbing hold of the idea of a musical. Then I bumped into a friend up in Napa when the California fires were happening. My wife Jane and I got caught in a hotel that was being evacuated. "We'd just started our dinner. I said, 'Wait a minute, what do you mean, "Evacuate now?" I just ordered my hors d'oeuvres!' And they said, 'Get out of here. This place is going up in flames.'
And it did – so we got out of there and went to this friend's house. And he asked me, 'Is there anything in your life that you'd like to get done and finished?' I said, 'Yeah, a musical about the painter Marc Chagall.' Thankfully, he just happened to be a guy who liked Chagall's work, and that's how it evolved as a project for performance.
"One of his friends is Kelsey Grammer [of Frasier fame], so he's got involved. He's done so much theatre in New York and so much television. He's a beautiful guy and he knows a lot of people in the business, but it all takes time. Kelsey started singing a couple of the songs, and it was so emotional for him because one of them related to something that happened in his own life.
"So they're talking about doing a rendition of it next spring. They said to wait until we get to Broadway, and I said, 'I don't think so. There are so many things going on on Broadway. Why don't we just try to do it in Boston?'"
When Prog last spoke to Anderson in 2023, Zamran – the long-awaited sequel to his 1976 masterwork Olias Of Sunhillow – and another project, Opus Opus, were separate entities. Although the situation clearly remains fluid, it seems the two concepts have fused into one masterwork.
"I listened to it on my walk this morning and it still shines," Anderson says. "I know it sounds crazy, but at the moment, it's over three hours long. I'm very lucky to work with an Irish videomaker, Michael Byrne, who might take into something with a multimedia slant. He's actually done many of my songs in video, and people seem to like his work.
"That's good for this project, which has worked out to be a piece with long-form musical and lyrical ideas. It's about the Earth Mother and how we can wake up and dream better, whereas Olias was definitely a storytelling operation. It was Zamran, and now it's all part of another project, Opus Opus. It's all crashing together."
Although the first volume of Anderson's 1000 Hands was released in 2019, volume two might still be some way off. He says he's still in touch with producer Michael Franklin, though. "He came up with some more ideas; I sent him some more ideas. I even started singing in Chinese to develop one. It's true. Believe me, I sounded terrible."
A little closer to fruition seems to be a follow-up to The Invention Of Knowledge , Anderson's 2016 project with Roine Stolt of The Flower Kings :
"I love that album but it wasn't the right time for that kind of music to be successful, I think. Whenever I listen to it, I think it's really good. We're looking at a follow-up for next year."
In addition to musical projects, there's also his autobiography – although he's somewhat surprised to be asked about it. The first chapter was released online in 2019, but it's gone quiet since then."The publishers asked me to do a second section from the part that I died in 2008 onwards," he explains.
"I started sketching it out; but over this period of touring it's fallen away a bit. It's not that I lost interest in it – I just think I couldn't put it together in my mind. Jane said, 'Well, I remember this and that.' I said, 'Great, can you help me?' She said, 'No, I don't want to get involved.' So we're a bit stuck!"
