Ashes Are Burning

Renaissance chose a deliberately more acoustic direction for this album, to suit their folk-influenced style and set them apart from electric-guitar bands. Between guitarists at the time, Jon Camp played most of the guitars. Michael Dunford, who until then had worked as a composer only, played acoustic guitar on a few tracks and rejoined the band after the album was out, so he is listed as a guest.

Most of the songwriting was done by post. Dunford sent Betty Thatcher a tape with a melody line, she wrote the words, and he mailed a tape of himself singing the finished song to the band, who built the arrangements in the studio. They recorded at De Lane Lea Studios and made the studio's engineer Dick Plant co-producer, and kept him for the next album.

Can You Understand? quotes a theme from Maurice Jarre's score for Doctor Zhivago, and Camp and Tout composed its opening instrumental of about two minutes thirty-eight seconds, which returns as the outro. On the Frontier was released the same year by former member Jim McCarty's band Shoot. At the Harbour opens and closes with excerpts from Debussy, which, after a change in copyright law, is why it was shortened on the 1978 double album In the Beginning, which paired the album with Prologue.

It reached 171 on the Billboard 200, the band's first chart entry there. Esoteric Recordings issued an expanded edition on 22 February 2019.