"South Side of the Sky" is a song by progressive rock band Yes from their album Fragile. It is one of the relatively few group performances on the album.
It opens with the sound of footsteps, followed by a howling wind. It then bursts into a heavy, riff-dominated rock song. At around 2:08, Rick Wakeman's piano comes in along with another few seconds of wind. At around 3:19, Chris Squire, Steve Howe and Jon Anderson start singing wordless vocal harmonies along with the piano. This continues until about 5:42, when the earlier heavy riff part returns, with the wind in the background. The song fades out in the end to the same howling wind that occurred throughout.
Rick Wakeman contributed to the writing of "South Side of the Sky" (and fellow album piece "Heart of the Sunrise") by adding piano interludes to both songs, but wasn't credited due to contractual conflicts. He was instead promised more money by Atlantic studio executives, which he claims he never saw.
In the liner notes of the remastered edition of Fragile, it is said that this song is about a tragic polar expedition that ends in death, as evidenced by lyrics such as "A river, a mountain to be crossed/ the sunshine, in mountains sometimes lost/ around the south side, so cold that we cried" and "The moments, seem lost in all the noise/ a snow storm, a stimulating voice". In the second half of the song, the references to the cold switch to lyrics that seem to reflect hypothermia, such as "Of warmth of the sky/ of warmth when you die" and "Were we ever warmer on that day". In the introduction to this song in Yes' 2003 concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Jon Anderson said, "This is a song about climbing mountains... It's dangerous, but we all must climb mountains every day."
"South Side of the Sky" was covered by the band Spock's Beard. The song is heard on the special edition third disc of their album Snow. A cover of this song, with vocal contributions by Jon Anderson, appears as the first track on Glass Hammer's 2007 album Culture of Ascent, a concept album about mountain climbing in the Himalayas.
Famous quotes containing the words south, side and/or sky:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;”
—Eugene Field (1850–1895)
“With spring the father-sky remakes the world:
The male shower has flowed into the bride,
Earth’s body; then shifted through sky and sea and land
To touch the quickening child in her deep side.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)