Olias of Sunhillow, płyta CD - Jon Anderson
Olias of Sunhillow is the first studio album by English singer-songwriter and musician Jon Anderson, released in July 1976 on Atlantic Records. It is a concept album which tells the story of an alien race and their journey to a new world following a volcanic catastrophe on their home planet. Anderson wrote and performed the music himself.
By mid-1975, Anderson had been the lead vocalist in the progressive rock band Yes for seven years. In August of that year the band, which was then a line-up of Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, and keyboardist Patrick Moraz, completed the 1974–1975 tour in support of their seventh album, Relayer. The group, who had been recording and touring consistently for the past five years, felt a break was necessary and agreed to take time off for each member to make their own solo album.
For his solo effort, Anderson wished to present a concept album which told a "semi-science fiction" story inspired by the artwork that Roger Dean had designed for Yes's fourth album, Fragile (1971). Dean's first piece of work for the group, the front cover depicts a tiny planet breaking apart and a glider escaping into space, which Anderson adapted into the story with additional inspiration from the novels The Finding of the Third Eye and The Initiation of the World by writer, painter, and mystic Vera Stanley Alder and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. The latter book by Alder describes the theory of four "nature tribes" that once lived on the planet: Negro, Oriental, Nordic, and Asian, which became the four tribes in Olias that were not of people, but "music consciousness tribes". On the first day of recording Anderson had yet to have a concrete story, but started to formulate one slowly from watching the sunrise that morning. He spent about a year on the story. Looking back on the album, Anderson thought it was "not that well mapped out" with "vague" interpretations of the different characters and settings. "I just thought of the story as three magicians coming out of space to take these tribes from one planet to another to save them from destruction. It's a very simple story [...] I hope it will be taken on a level without people thinking there are any hidden meanings."
Anderson's growing desire to learn about musical structure and his own performing capabilities with various instruments made Olias of Sunhillow a platform for him to explore this with a self-taught approach, without help from other musicians. He had previously relied on his Yes band mates for seeing his ideas for songs through and decided against the idea of spending time learning to play the piano with a teacher. Halfway through the album, it became clear to Anderson what he could and could not do: "You just find out where you're at in being able to express yourself. It was an intense period of time." Despite not being proficient with keyboards or percussion instruments at the time Anderson thought that "What I've pulled off attracts me and sounds right", and focused on the accuracy of expressing his ideas to tape rather than the technical ability of his playing."
