Best Song on Close to the Edge

After a while I realised the track I listened to most was Siberian Khatru...so I vote it my fave!

The Title track or And You And I.  As the votes seem to indicate, Siberian Khatru is a bit of a let down after the first two tracks, IMO South Side of the Sky worked much better as a rocker...but SK starts off very strong, and the harpsichord/slide guitar exchange is stunning, but then the guys insist on repeating that same line over and over and over and over and over and over.

so...the title track it is.  A very emotional song for me, especially when...well, you know what part I'm talking about

Thing is, though, none of these tracks had really been "20-minute songs" in the truest sense. ALL of them essentially were several "conventional" pop and rock songs strung together with instrumental breaks instead of pauses, with a couple of reprises here and there to provide a proper feeling of "completion" at the end. Now, one may argue that that is actually the preferred way to approach a side-long track, and I of course love all of these to death (er, except Lizard. Lizard annoys me). But still, all of these tracks could easily be split into different songs and listened to separately (er, if you had that capability with your listening device).

So Yes took a different route, a route that was both simpler and more complicated than what had previously been attempted. And what was that route? Well, first of all, examine the basic structure of a pop-song, as mentioned in a comment below: Intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle8/instrumental-break/verse/chorus/outro. To this point, the general idea had been to make the basic verse and chorus melodies as compact as possible, with a minimal amount of development and deconstruction. But, smart men they were, Yes realized that this structure could just as well support lengthy, intensely developed and complex verse melodies. And so they went this route, and in essence created the world's first 19-minute pop song.

Now, of course, this artistic path is fraught with peril. Lengthy tracks of the 'conventional' manner all had an important safeguard - if one of the 'themes' they wrote turned out to be unlistenable crap, this would be somewhat countered by the fact it would be short, as the band would soon move to better things. In other words, if the 'main themes' that Yes would come up for their epic piece weren't absolutely top-of-the-line, the song they were constructing would end up as aural fecal matter. In short, if the band wasn't making quantity of musical ideas their main goal, they sure as heck needed to worry about the quality.

Ah, but that's what makes the song so amazing - I can tell you, with nary a doubt in my mind, that the band pulled this feat off amazingly. First things first, the band probably realized the potential accusations of "lack of diversity" that would come their way, so they compensated by throwing all sorts of influences into the pot at one time and running with the finished product. I mean, take a step back and consider for a second all of the many musical descriptions that CTTE has received just in the web-reviewing community; taken all together, the song is a 19 minute free-form-electric-acid-jazzrock/ambient piece with a pop song structure, a classical form and hints of reggae. And every one of those individual descriptions is accurate! Not to mention all of the incredible melodic and vocal hooks found throughout, or (as described below) the brilliant layering of vocal harmonies in places.