This post is part two of my reflection on Jon Anderson and Vangelis’ song “He is Sailing.” Part one is here.

Immediately the song begins with syncopated synthesized sounds that evoke a plucked guitar atop a familiar high-hat-snare rock beat, just a hair removed from a too-clean-and-shiny disco sheen. Beneath it trowls the fruity fatness of 80s synth-bass sounds, which are mildly bombastic and evoke a certain gravitas and lightness all at once. This is the sound, in that era, of “new age” music, or the kind of “space music” that some US radio listeners will recognize from the show “Hearts of Space” (which I listened to regularly on public radio in Kansas City in the 1980s and ’90s).

The evoking of that atmosphere is not incidental to the potential theological significance of the song. Indeed, the cultivation of a particularly “spacious” sonic atmosphere all the way through will prove crucial to the way the song becomes available to a theologically-interested hearing. “Space music” is a kind of pop-orchestral synthesized music that typically aims to represent — and induce — a feeling for the whole, or perhaps an intuition of the inescapability of the whole-as-promised, a taste for the grandeur of a beyond that calls us out of all the forms of gravity that bind us. A percussive and melodic drone of electronic pulse and tone invites the listener there. (There are certainly no drum or guitar solos in this musico-spiritual world.)

Why do these sounds clearly work this way for some hearers, while others find these sounds merely tedious, trite, or otherwise forgettable? Is it the heritage, in the Western tradition, of orchestral music and romanticism in service of the cultivation of awareness of the sublime, a heritage variously appropriated today? Or is it that music somehow expresses religious sensibilities, like those charted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, that some people simply seem to have while others just as simply do not?

We have not yet gotten to the lyrics, but I will try to turn to those in the next installment.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

“I don’t care if it['s] about religion or not, the song is awesome!”

“We played this at my father’s funeral. It uplifted my soul. Amazing song.”

“Simply pure and beautiful.”

“A match of sound, made in heaven for us mortals to enjoy – Jon and Vangelis.”

These are some of the comments on the YouTube page for the song “He is Sailing,” recorded by Jon Anderson and Vangelis for their album Private Collection (Polydor, 1983). Jon Anderson was for several decades the lead singer of the famous rock band Yes, and Vangelis is a world-renowned keyboardist and electronic musician. In the 1970s and 1980s they collaborated several times.

When I was in college (1987-1992), I discovered Private Collection, as part of a general discovery in depth of Anderson and Yes. This was probably through a recommendation made by someone on an email list (“listserv”) for the rock band Rush, which I started reading soon after I got on the Internet in 1988. Lots of Rush fans were also Yes fans, and we often emailed recommendations to each other and traded tapes and videos through the mail. It is also possible that I found this album by browsing at local record stores in 1988-89 in midtown Kansas City, as I was a student at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Somehow I found this record (in cassette form, no doubt), and listened to it on my Walkman. When “He is Sailing” came on, I was fairly deep in the throes of a conflicted but nevertheless evangelical Catholicism, of the film The Razor’s Edge (the Bill Murray version), of various relationships with women, of playing college rock band music, and of overall religious questions and questions about religion that seemed to not only make for the weave of my everyday life but also to loom large at various big turns in my life. Into this “normal,” if particular, late-adolescent maelstrom came Anderson+Vangelis’ “He is Sailing,” a tune that, like many other songs by these musicians, had cosmic aspirations while hinting at revelatory origins. Here is the song:

I have now had 23 years with this song, and also met Anderson on a train several years ago and saw him perform solo, and so have had both time and motivation to let it steep theologically. I am not sure how well I can render that steeping in blog posts, but I want to try, if necessarily briefly and somewhat superficially. I’ll pick it up in a followup post.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York