Walking home from a lover’s bed at dawn: Jon & Vangelis – I Hear You Now

It’s 6:00am. You can’t feel the ground. The streets are empty save a jogger who can’t possibly understand the peaks and crevices of desire you’ve cascaded over for the hours the moon was in the sky.

You’ve just left a lover’s bed, for the first, perhaps the second time.

This moment doesn’t need a song, but if it did, it would have to be ‘I Hear You Now’ from the partnership of electronica composer Vangelis and progressive rocker Jon Anderson.

Vangelis’ sweeping synths will be familiar to anyone who watched Harrison Ford hunt cyborgs in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

To my mind, there’s always seemed something a little bloated about Jon Anderson’s main project, the psychedelic Yes. I want to like it but can’t. But matched to Vangelis’ relatively more linear and contained songwriting, Anderson’s vocals and romantic lyrics start open up ethereal worlds.

Yes, Vangelis’ sweeping synths, Anderson’s euphoric vocals, the song sounds and feels ‘new-age’ religious. But the sacred experience Anderson is singing about is actually entirely secular.

“I Hear You Now”: It’s about encountering this other person, in some real, really real way, on a deep and primary level, stripped – impossibly of the deadness of everyday relations. The song evokes both musically and lyrically the heightened sense perception and the weightlessness that comes with the discovery of a person who is a retort to all the darkness and insecurity.

At least, that’s how I feel after really good sex.

A lot of people can’t stand Jon Anderson, and this song might seem to the more cynical to be sentimental and hopelessly naïve,  but then again so is falling in love.

And yet of course, the synthesisers can only crescendo for so long, and the song – like the euphoria of love – eventually comes to an end.