Philosophical Reflections: "It Can Happen" by Yes

Having the right music playing when you’re huffing and puffing at the gym can make a tremendous difference. In the mishmash of musical albums and genres on my iPod, I’ve found myself coming back again and again to the Yes album 91025 (released in 1983), and specifically to the song “It Can Happen.” There’s just something about that particular song that I can’t seem to get enough of as I’m sweating it up on the elliptical machine. It’s one of those songs that, once it begins to fade, I go back and restart. Of course, given who I am, when such an anomalous habit takes shape, I have to wonder why. Why does “It Can Happen” so captivate me?

Is it the lyrics? I don’t think so. To be honest, I’ve only just now looked carefully at them, and though there are a few flashes of poetic promise, I don’t find myself gripped as if they’ve finally put some deeply held, yet elusive truth into words for me. It seems a bit more like they’ve paired some tangentially related, abstract phrases in an effort to appear deep and esoteric.

Is it the tempo? The beat? Well, to be sure, these things help in getting through my workout. And there is something about a bass cranking out repeated quarter notes on the tonic in a driving rock-and-roll song that connects with my spirit. Still, it’s not that alone.

A magazine article I read a couple of years back introduced me to the musical representation of philosophical, theological, and metaphysical concepts through the way the composer (the article was speaking of J. S. Bach) utilized dissonance and resolution: an extended period without resolution set the listener up to yearn for the return to the root chord, which, even with vast departures from it, seems to stick in the residual memory. When resolution comes (if, indeed, it does), it is like a fulfillment of the very yearnings the composer has created within us through dissonance.

Believe it or not, this is what I find in “It Can Happen.” In fact, it is the repeated return to resolution—to the base key—in the song that I find myself greatly anticipating through the wandering verses and solos. But when it comes, it comes full-on, each time better than the last: the aforementioned driving tonic bass notes, the complementary harmonies (vocal and instrumental)…it’s like coming home after a long journey, it’s a resolution to disparate, even seemingly irresolvable, tensions.

And of course, this gels well with my worldview. Saint Thomas Aquinas put forth an exitus-reditus schema to creation: all things flow out from God and are drawn back into God. The consummation of all things will be marked by a unity—a union, in fact—of God and man through Christ (cf. Ephesians 1:7-10).

Were these types of things intended by Yes in composing and performing the song? Doubtful. Still, the song speaks to me in this way…and whether such a metaphysical statement is consciously intended or not, given the way our universe is structured, It Can Happen! See what you think…