Songfacts®:

• Drama was the first Yes album without Jon Anderson on lead vocals. Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman had quit the group the previous year over various creative and financial disagreements. In their place stepped Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes - better known as principal members of the Buggles, of "Video Killed The Radio Star" fame. So, the incarnation of Yes that recorded this album and song was essentially a merger of the two groups.
• The song's title is never mentioned in the lyrics; the chorus instead features the refrain, "I am a camera." The song is about memories - some vanish quickly but others are indelible, as if shot with a camera.
• In a Songfacts interview with Geoff Downes, he said: "That was one of the songs we took into Yes when we first met up with them and they asked us to write some stuff. It was effectively just a small, four-minute pop song. And of course, they opened it up and treated it as an epic that became 'Into The Lens,' which is about 10 minutes long on the Drama album. It was quite fascinating to put a song like that in and see how those guys treated it, and how the sections developed."
• The unlikely merger of Yes and Buggles turned out to be short-lived, disbanding after their 1980 tour as each member moved on to other projects. Horn and Downes returned to the Buggles to record that group's follow-up album, Adventures In Modern Recording. Among that album's tracks is an abbreviated and reworked version of this song, under the title "I Am A Camera." Downes left the Buggles before that album was finished to join Steve Howe's newly formed supergroup Asia. Horn was able to complete the album without Downes, but it tanked, leading to the Buggles' demise and Horn's career change from a recording artist to strictly a producer. Meanwhile, Chris Squire and Alan White tried to form a supergroup of their own. They approached Jimmy Page and Robert Plant about forming a new band that would have been called XYZ ("ex-Yes and Zeppelin"). Plant was not interested, so instead Squire and White formed a new group named Cinema. By 1983 Cinema had evolved into a new incarnation of Yes, complete with Jon Anderson back on lead vocals - and none other than Trevor Horn as their producer. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Joshua - Twin Cities, MN
• Appropriately, Yes made a music video for this song, which is mostly studio performance footage but also includes a shot of Trevor Horn overlayed on a body of water as he sings. It has pretty good production value for 1980.