Owner of a Lonely Heart
| "Owner of a Lonely Heart" | ||||||||||
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| Single by Yes | ||||||||||
| from the album 90125 | ||||||||||
| B-side | "Our Song" | |||||||||
| Released | 8 October 1983 | |||||||||
| Format | 7" and 12" vinyl | |||||||||
| Recorded | 1983 | |||||||||
| Genre | Dance-rock | |||||||||
| Length | 4:27 (album version) 3:50 (7") |
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| Label | Atco | |||||||||
| Writer(s) | Trevor Rabin, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Trevor Horn | |||||||||
| Producer(s) | Trevor Horn | |||||||||
| Yes singles chronology | ||||||||||
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"Owner of a Lonely Heart" is a song by the English progressive rock band Yes. It is the first track and single from their eleventh studio album 90125, released in 1983. Written primarily by guitarist Trevor Rabin, contributions were made to the final version by singer Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, and producer Trevor Horn.
"Owner of a Lonely Heart" was released in October 1983, as the album's first single. It was a commercial success in the United States, becoming the band's first and only single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and its Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. In 1984, the song reached No. 8 in the year-end charts in the US. The single was reissued various times throughout the 1980s and 1990s with different remix versions and B-sides. The song has been sampled by various artists including Michael Jackson, Frank Zappa and Max Graham, whose 2005 single reached No. 9 in the UK.
The first version was a four track version Rabin recorded at his home studio in London in 1980 (and which was eventually released in 2003 on his 90124 album). Rabin played all instruments on the demo as well as singing. In 2012, he would reminisce "I had a four-track recorder for demos, so you would record on the first and second tracks and then mix it to a third track. You would be making decisions based on what was coming, and sometimes those decisions would be wrong — but you couldn’t undo them. One of the things, a happy accident, was that all of the brass stabs and those weird things that happen on the record — they were just a product of what happened with the demo. When we started the record, in talking with Trevor Horn, he said we should retain that stuff. We’ll just record that really cleanly. I said I’d like to keep the levels very loud, and he was totally into that. That’s kind of how it evolved. All of the accidents on the demo, ended up on the record."
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