“Starship Trooper” by Yes

"Starship Trooper" first landed on The Yes Album in 1971, and it's three songs welded into one space-age suite: "Life Seeker", "Disillusion" and "Würm". Jon Anderson, Steve Howe and Chris Squire each brought a piece. Anderson did most of the work on "Life Seeker", borrowing the title from Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers and turning the trooper into a kind of guardian angel and Mother Earth. Squire's "Disillusion" had already served, with other words and Squire singing, as the bridge of "For Everyone". Howe's "Würm", that slow, hypnotic climb of a guitar finale, dates back to his earlier band Bodast.

Eddy Offord produced it for Atlantic, and the thing was stitched together so heavily in the studio that Yes could never quite play it live the way it sounds on record. In Britain, "Life Seeker" turned up as the B-side of "Your Move".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.