Fragile contains nine tracks; four are "group arranged and performed" with the remaining five being "the individual ideas, personally arranged and organised" by the five members, as described in the liner notes. Squire reasoned that this approach was necessary in part to save time and reduce studio costs: "We have a lot of mouths to feed. Rick ... had to buy a vast amount of new equipment when he joined, and it all costs much more money than people seem to imagine."
Side one by
Johannes Brahms, with an electric piano used for the string section, grand piano for the woodwinds, organ for the brass, electric harpsichord for reeds, and synthesiser as
contrabassoon. Wakeman said the piece took an estimated 15 hours to create in the studio, and said it was most likely Bruford who inspired its title from looking at Wakeman playing each section while wearing his headphones. He looked back on the piece as "dreadful", as contractual problems with
A&M Records, with whom he was signed as a solo artist, prevented him from writing a composition of his own. Anderson described "We Have Heaven" as a "rolling idea of voices and things", with its two main sets of chants containing the phrases "Tell the Moon dog, tell the March hare" and "He is here, to look around". The track ends with the sound of a door closing followed by running footsteps, which segues into the atmospheric introduction to the next track, the group arranged "
South Side of the Sky". According to Tait, its original title was "Suddenly It's Wednesday", The song segues, after Howe plays a guitar run with an
Echoplex delay effect, "Mood for a Day" is Howe's solo track, which was his second acoustic guitar solo put on a Yes album, following "Clap". He played a
Conde flamenco guitar, but considers the album version substandard in comparison to how he learned to play it on stage years later. The track is where Wakeman's classically trained background came into play; he introduced the band to
recapitulation, a musical concept where previous segments in a piece are revisited. Bruford considers it as the group's breakthrough piece in terms of originality: "It had the drama and the poise and the kind of fey, pastoral English-y lyrics at the beginning where the music all gives way to a slightly feminine vocal." Howe originally played the song on the ES-5 Switchmaster, but it failed to produce satisfactory results. He found success with his
Gibson ES-175. Several seconds after the song, the sound of a door opening is heard before a reprise of "We Have Heaven" is played, acting as a
hidden track. ==Artwork==