Jon Anderson Recounts Chris Squire Visiting Him in a Dream
Jon Anderson was on holiday with his wife in Maui in 2015 when he had a "beautiful dream" about his former Yes bandmate Chris Squire.
"To my left, I could see this one lady standing there with robes. She looked like an angel, and she probably was," the singer recently recalled to Rolling Stone. "She pointed up [to] the [sky] and there was Chris smiling with tears coming down his eyes and face."
When Anderson awoke, he told his wife about the dream. "I said, 'I just saw Chris. He was heading towards the light of heaven,'" he recounted. "She said, 'He loved you.' I said, 'Yeah. We were brothers.' It was an incredible moment."
Squire died at the age of 67 on June 27, 2015, a month after he announced a diagnosis of acute erythroid leukemia. A few months later, Anderson was performing a show in Phoenix where he met Squire's widow, Scotland, and told her the story. "She said to me, 'He kept saying before he passed away that he wanted to go to Maui,'" he said. "There you go."
Anderson - who co-founded Yes alongside Squire, Peter Banks, Tony Kaye and Bill Bruford - has not performed with the band since 2004, when asthmatic attacks forced him off the road. Yes has since carried on without him and currently features Jon Davison as their singer.
But Anderson harbored no grudges and has moved on with his solo career, performing with various groups and playing both Yes songs and new original work. "In a way, it was a breakthrough for me," he explained. "I was emotionally still able to enjoy performing the songs that I wrote for the band. You have to let go of things and just get on with life."
According to Anderson, he'd be interested in potentially reconvening with the band, though guitarist Steve Howe has previously described such a reunion as "completely unthinkable."
"I've mentioned a couple of times over the years that I'm very open to giving it a whirl," Anderson said. "In these days, though, you never know what's going to happen."
Regardless, Anderson said he has plenty to keep him busy. He's currently workshopping a musical about the artist Marc Chagall that he first started writing 40 years ago. An abbreviated version of the show was recently staged in San Francisco. He also hopes to have the second part of his 2019 solo album, 1000 Hands, ready next year. Plus, he's written an album in Chinese.
"I'm at a place in my career where I'm feeling like I'm in a very creative mode all the time," he said. "You're going to have a lot of music coming out over the next five years."