Islands , with lyrics by Peter Sinfield and music predominantly by Robert Fripp, is a loose concept album that evokes the Homeric ideal of seafaring travel. Gentle and luminous at times, harsh and disorienting at others, the album has a mythic feel to it that adds a certain weight to the lyrics, which pull from a collection of images that range from The Odyssey and Carl Jung to, perhaps, Joyce. While working on my chapter concerning the fourth King Crimson album, Islands , I began to notice some rather curious parallels to Ulysses . Similarly, Joyce describes sex as enjoyable and disgusting. The chapter begins with Leopold Bloom feeding the seagulls.
Islands turns the sequence around.
In the title song of Islands the protagonist becomes quite fond of water. Reincarnation, a subtext of the album, also figures into Ulysses . Although Jon Green admits that neither Fripp or Sinfield have commented upon his hypothesis, I feel that it is certainly plausible, and definitely interesting enough to warrant inclusion here. Here I wander where sweet sage and strange herbs grow Down a sun-baked crumpled stony road. Here I'm shadowed by a dragon fig tree's fan Ringed by ants and musing over man.