In 1998, the album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for selling over one million copies in the United States.

[4] The liner notes do not list recording dates or locations, but audio comparisons of the album and the live box set Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy-Two (2015) can be made,[3][5] in addition to the soundtrack to the Yessongs concert film.

[6] They are: Yessongs begins with "Opening (Excerpt from 'Firebird Suite')", the closing section to the orchestral work The Firebird by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

The recording of the Suite heard on Yessongs is by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, first released in 1970 (RCA Red Seal – LSB 4009); it uses Stravinsky's 1919 re-orchestration.

[3] The album was originally presented in a gatefold sleeve with artwork designed and illustrated by the band's longtime associate, artist Roger Dean.

[8] The large space for Dean's work allowed him to continue a theme that "implied a story" that he introduced on the cover of Fragile, which portrays a planet breaking into pieces and a spacecraft in flight.

[9] Dean recalled that talks about the artwork for Yessongs were scarce until he presented the group with a rough version of his "Pathways" painting, which was well received and influenced his decision to continue the narrative.

[11] "Arrival" depicts these fragments landing in the waters of the new world, with "Awakening" showing signs of new life starting, including plant and animal species.

[11] The version with the girl sitting on top of the pathway structure was not in the original, and was painted separately and added later at the printing stage.

[14][13] In June 2013, Dean filed a $50 million lawsuit against director James Cameron for copyright and contributory infringement and unjust enrichment, claiming the design of Pandora, a fictional setting in Cameron's epic science fiction film Avatar (2009) and the highest-grossing film at the time, was based on Dean's paintings including "Pathways" and used without permission.

[15] The lawsuit was thrown out by judge Jesse M. Furman in September 2014 who disagreed and believed the court found no substantial similarities between the film and Dean's artwork.

[23] On 2 June 1973, the American magazine Cash Box reported that the album had reached gold certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for selling 500,000 copies in the US.