hot 100

Description

"Owner of a Lonely Heart" is a song by the progressive rock band Yes. It is the opening track of their 1983 album 90125. Written primarily by Trevor Rabin (who was new to the band at the time), the song reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 — to date Yes' biggest chart success by far. The song's music video, directed by Peter Christopherson, received a great deal of airplay on MTV, introducing the revamped Yes lineup and sound to a new generation of fans largely unfamiliar with the band's very different earlier work, which had helped to define the genre of progressive rock. The video begins with a bird flying over different areas and then cuts to an archetypal Everyman as he tries to make it through a day whilst being shocked by pseudo-psychotic flashes of being menaced by the various animals. He is brought to court by government-looking toughs, summarily thrown out of court and into a boiler room where he fights a bruiser, then runs onto the roof of the building. There, he is confronted by the various band members, shifting back and forth between human and animal guises, which drives him to leap from the building. The video then ends with the same man in the same crowd as at the beginning of the video, but instead he turns back, presumably to go home and avoid the day. Notably, keyboardist Tony Kaye does not appear in the video. At the time of the video shoot, Eddie Jobson was standing in as the band's keyboardist. He can be seen briefly in a few quick shots, but he was not part of the video's "animal transformation" scene in which the other four band members take part. Ultimately, Kaye returned to the lineup, and it is not believed that Jobson ever recorded any material with the band.