text: Anderson had smoked cannabis during the trip, "so everything was vivid and mystical". Anderson added: "It was a cloudy day, we couldn't see the top of the mountains. We could only see the clouds because it was sheer straight up ... I remember saying, 'Oh, the mountains–look! They're coming out of the sky!'" He began to write the song's lyrics in his notebook in a free-form style with minimal edits: "I just loved how words sounded when I put them together."
  Within 24 hours, the band had arrived back home in London where Anderson reunited with his then wife Jennifer, which inspired the song's lyric "Twenty-four before my love, you'll see, I'll be there with you". A loch they passed as they neared Glasgow became the idea behind the line "In and around the lake". Upon their arrival at their hotel in Glasgow, Anderson and Howe began to put down song ideas on their recorder.
  In August 1971, Yes regrouped in London to prepare material for their fourth album, Fragile (1971). Early into the sessions, keyboardist Tony Kaye was fired from the group over his lack of interest in learning more keyboards to expand the band's sound, and was replaced by Rick Wakeman. The group then moved to Advision Studios in September 1971 to record Fragile with audio engineer Eddy Offord as their co-producer, using a 16-track recording machine to layer their ideas, at which point, Howe later said, "The song became pure magic". The rhythm tracks were recorded first, in separate sections. Fragile contains four group-performed songs with five solo tracks written and arranged by each member; "Roundabout" is one of such collaborative tracks.