Songfacts®:

• The title stands for "Where Does Music Come From." Anderson thought that was a bit wordy, so he compressed it into an initialism.
• Jon Anderson believes that music comes from the divine, you just have to have an open heart to receive it. He was 75 years old when this song was released, and had never in his life suffered from writer's block. Even when he nearly died in 2008 after a nasty asthma attack, songs still came to him. He says the drive to write and create has gotten stronger as he's aged.
• The bones of the song date back to 1990 when Anderson, who had recently left Yes, started working on it for a solo album called Uzlot. He re-joined the band later that year and put the project on the shelf, where it stayed until the producer Michael T. Franklin approached him in 2019 about revisiting it. Franklin lined up a series of guest musicians to fill in the missing pieces. On "WDMCF" he also gave it a very modern production, with EDM elements - a far cry from what Yes fans are used to. At the end of the song, it resolves into a piano coda played by one of those famous guests: Chick Corea, taking the song from one musical extreme to the other.
• The "Manama tip pop pop" refrain came from one of Jon Anderson's vocalization exercises. To warm up his voice and get his creative juices flowing, he would chant whatever entered his consciousness and sometimes incorporate these chants into his songs.
• Anderson doesn't factor in hit potential when he makes music, but when he heard this one, he knew it could find a contemporary audience. "When 1000 Hands was released I thought 'Where Does Music Come From' would be a big, big record if it got the chance to be heard," he told Songfacts. "Because it's pretty wild and crazy and different, and you can dance to it."