Yes guitarist Steve Howe has confirmed that, despite the band's reputation for sprawling, thematically linked prog rock, only one of their roughly 25 studio albums was actually intended as a full concept album: the 1973 double LP Tales From Topographic Oceans. The clarification matters because it reshapes how fans understand the band's catalogue, showing that their earlier works, while stylistically similar, were not conceived with the same singular narrative ambition.

The album, running 81 minutes across four vinyl sides, was inspired by frontman Jon Anderson's reading of Paramahansa Yogananda's 1946 memoir Autobiography of a Yogi during Yes's 1973 US tour, and drew on Hindu scriptural concepts such as the shastras. Anderson and Howe developed the material secretly in hotel rooms while touring, before unveiling it to bandmates Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Alan White during a stop in Savannah, Georgia; White embraced the ambitious concept, while Squire and particularly Wakeman were reportedly less enthusiastic.