Leave It

This was the followup to Yes' #1 smash, "Owner Of A Lonely Heart." 90125 was a different sound for Yes, as they moved away from prog rock and toward pop - very successfully. Once the band (and their record company) got a taste for hit singles, they tried to make more, which frustrated lead singer Jon Anderson. "By the time we got to Big Generator (1987 album) I was ready to leave because nobody was happy," he told Songfacts. "We were scrambling to try to make a hit record, and the record company, the management, that's all they talked about. They'd play records and say, 'This is a hit record, make something like this.'"

Eighteen different videos of this song were presented to MTV as part of a contest. When the deadline for the entries passed, MTV showed "Version #19," directed by the team of Godley and Creme. In the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson talks about the excitement of filming the video of "Leave It" for MTV: "A totally surreal sort of video, which I loved. By then, we were number one around the world, so we were immensely famous for 10 minutes. That was it. It was, 'Oh, we're going to be upside-down... that's cool! Let's do 17 versions. Oh great, that's amazing!' So there were actually 17 different versions of this video, which is perfect. Anything more abstract really reaches me, because it's something that I'll remember, where sometimes you do a video, and you think, 'Oh, that looks OK,' and ten minutes later, you don't care. But something that's abstract, you can look at it now and think 'That's a damn good video,' because it is different."

Promo copies of the 45 single contained a version with the group singing a cappella.