According to Nick Tosches, who wrote Dangerous Dances, the authorized biography of Hall & Oates, "RCA refused to release Sacred Songs on the grounds that it wasn't commercial" (p 85).

[3] Fripp had dissolved his group King Crimson in 1974, and after a sabbatical, returned to music with session work and other guest appearances.

Tosches notes that a groundswell of interest was generated inside the music profession and from Hall's fans with a letter-writing campaign directed at RCA requesting the album's release.

Nearly thirty years after Hall recorded these songs, most were finally released on the 2006 re-issue of Exposure (1979) by Fripp's Discipline Global Mobile label.

The lyrical content alludes to some of Hall's interests in Aleister Crowley's system of esoteric magic (or "magick" as it is sometimes spelled).

In that interview Hall indicated that in 1974 he began a serious study of esoteric spirituality, reading books on topics like the cabala, the ancient Celts, and the traditions of the Druids.

[citation needed] Crowley coined the concept of Thelema, magick concerned with harnessing the power of the imagination and willpower to effect changes in consciousness and in the material universe.

Fripp shared similar interests in mysticism; while at Sherbourne House in the mid-seventies, he studied the recorded lectures of the late John G. Bennett, a disciple of G. I.