THE INTRO

Yes icon tried to avoid writing songs for new solo album – and half-succeeded.

Steve Howe tells us all about his new solo album, and there’s the latest news from Simon Collins, Lonely Robot, Magenta, Steve Rothery, Nick D’Virgilio, Frost*, Protest The Hero and more.

It took Steve Howe several years to work out how his song Love Is A River needed to work – and once he’d done that, his new solo album, Love Is, quickly took shape around it.

The 10-track follow-up to 2011’s Time (not counting two more records in his Homebrew series of demos and rearrangements) contains five instrumentals and five songs, and features Yes bandmate Jon Davison on backing vocals and bass, plus son Dylan Howe on drums.

“It covers a reflective three or four years where a lot of things happened – a lot of highs and a few lows,” Howe Senior says. “I let it mature like a good cheese; I wanted it to reflect some strength, some colour and some experience. I’m very happy to spend many years developing a song, although I’m not working on it all the time.

I redesign it, leave it, come back to it until: ‘Now

I know what this is!’”

Once he’d realised Love Is

A River was the “essential track” he’d been looking for, he arranged the other pieces around it and named the album after it.

“I daren’t start with it,” he says, explaining why