Rick Wakeman Bowie's offer and played his final gig with Strawbs for a BBC recording for John Peel's radio show. Wakeman then reappeared on the front cover of "Melody Maker", his second in a year, regarding his move to Yes. His earnings increased from £18 to £50 per week. Towards the end of 1971, Wakeman signed a five album solo recording contract with A&M Records. Yes made "Fragile" in five weeks to help finance a new set of keyboards for Wakeman. Wakeman recorded "Cans and Brahms", an adaptation of the third movement of Symphony No. 4 in E minor by Johannes Brahms.
The Fragile (Nine Inch Nails album) and writes that "The Fragile" uses funk bass lines, North African minor-key modalities, and the treatment of tonality by Symbolist composers like Debussy. The album also features several distorted guitar parts which Powers suggests that fans can enjoy. Rob Sheffield observes a "prog-rock vibe" akin to Pink Floyd's 1979 album "The Wall" and feels that "The Fragile" is similarly "a double album that vents ... alienation and misery into paranoid studio hallucinations, each track crammed with overdubs until there's no breathing room". Described by Reznor as a sequel to "The Downward Spiral"—an album with a plot detailing the destruction of