Starless

Starless began as a ballad by Wetton with lyrics by Richard Palmer-James, presented at a rehearsal in late 1973. Wetton recalled the band meeting it with polite indifference, but they liked the chorus line "starless and bible black", which Palmer-James took from Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood, and that phrase became the title of the previous album. Cross worked on the opening melody at a soundcheck and said of Fripp, "he reckoned I started it and he finished it". Bruford worked out the glowering bass melody of the central section on a piano at home. The final section reuses a bass part written for Fracture.

The solo in the breakdown has Fripp playing one note across two strings, bending the pitch, for more than four minutes. Steven Wilson called it the "death of prog solo". In live versions Cross played the central motif on violin, while on record Fripp plays it on guitar. The song was first played live just days after the arrangement was finished, with a crimson stage light as it built. By the time they recorded it in July 1974 at Olympic Studios the band had played it more than 51 times. Fripp's diary of the last performance, at Central Park in New York on 1 July 1974, records that the lights at the end of Starless really blew the crowd.

Pitchfork's Sodomsky called it "the finest song the group would ever record", and PopMatters' Sean Murphy wrote in 2023 that it is "one of the all-time progressive rock masterworks". It plays over the opening titles of the 2018 film Mandy.