An Interview With Ian Anderson Of Jethro Tull

Image credit: Will Ireland -courtesy-of-Chipster-PR.

At 77, Ian Anderson remains sharp-witted, laconic, humorous, and brilliant. To converse with him is to gain insight not previously had. That sounds obvious, but it’s deeper than it appears. More importantly, the same can be said about his music, which lately, as in the last few post-Covid years, he’s gotten back to releasing as Jethro Tull.

Before 2022’s The Zealot Gene, the last Jethro Tull album proper was 2003’s underwhelming, if not absurd, wholly unasked-for, and ill-fated The Jethro Tull Christmas Album. In fact, given the existence of said Christmas record, it’s no wonder that Anderson moved on to solo work.

Anyway, while better than that prog-laden holiday smorgasbord, The Zealot Gene wasn’t exactly primetime Tull… but it was a start. A reboot, if you will. But rebooted and prolific as Anderson was, 2023’s RökFlöte wasn’t much better, though still an improvement by some measures.

This leads us to 2025, which sees Anderson still recording as Jethro Tull, and, finally, delivering a properly Tull-sounding record in Curious Ruminant. If you know anything about Ian Anderson or have spent any length of time chatting him up, you probably are aware that he hardly seems to care about sounding like anything other than he wants to sound at a given moment.

You would believe that… until digging into this new Tull record, at which point it becomes obvious that Anderson, while cagey about the idea in conversation, is clearly looking back specifically to Tull’s ‘70s heyday. This is good news if you’re a fan of Tull, aka a “Tull head,” which I just made up.

Specifically, this is good news if you believe that Jethro Tull is best served with a side of Martin Barre. No, Barre, aka the best damn guitarist this band ever has, has not returned to the fold—but newcomer Jack Clark, either via his own volition or, more likely, through the direction of Anderson, has done a fine job of making it like it’s the year of Aqualung all over again. Which, for the record, was 1971.

Time flies, doesn’t it? But no, that doesn’t mean Curious Ruminant is anywhere close to Aqualung, or Thick as a Brick, or A Passion Play, or Minstrel in the Gallery, for that matter. But it does mean that, finally, Jethro Tull has made a proper Tullian record worth feasting on again.

And maybe, just maybe, at 77, Ian Aderson still has enough gas left in the tank to prove once and for all that, despite his best intentions or attempts, Tull is, and always was, prog rock’s ultimate guitar band… served with a heaping side of flute for good measure.

In support of Curious Ruminant, Ian Anderson beamed in with ClassicRockHistory.com to dig into the making of the record, the dynamics of his band, and his charmed relationship with record companies.

What kicked off Jethro Tull’s lates record, Curious Ruminant?

If you’d asked me in April of last year in 2024, “Do you have plans for a new album?” I would have said, “No, I don’t have any plans not to make a new album—but I don’t actually have plans to make one.” Then, if you’d asked me that in the middle of May of 2024, I would have said, “Oh, funny you ask because I’ve started work on a new album.” [laughs]

What changed your mind?

It came about primarily because I was, well, my son was about to trash an old laptop computer that had some audio files on it that I’d used back in 2006. I think I bought it in order to record some music, and it had some audio files, which, before he smashed up the hard disk with a hammer, he thought he should check with me if I wanted to keep anything.

Normally, I would have said, “No,” but I said, “Well, send it to me anyway…” And on there was a demo that I made for a long piece of music to be played as a flute duet with the venerable Indian classical flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia, with whom we had some upcoming concerts scheduled in India and Dubai. And the demo was made with our then-keyboard player, Andrew Giddings.

So, essentially, the genesis of this record came from forgotten demos from 2006?

It was just rough ideas that we didn’t use because Hariprasad Chaurasia decided he wanted to play a traditional Indian raga together rather than something I’d written. So, I’d just forgotten [about it], and when I heard it again all these years later, I was immediately struck by how good I thought my bamboo flute playing was. I thought, “Wow… that’s brilliant. You know, I would really like people to be able to hear that.”

From there, how did the album begin to take shape?

So, I started developing that demo and added bass guitar, drums, guitars, and Cajan, and I wrote some lyrics and a melody and integrated it all into a lengthy track, which is on the new album, and that was the first one I completed.

What came next?

The second track that I worked on was the one that became titled “Curious Ruminant.” When I finished recording that, I didn’t have a title for it, and I looked through the lyrics of the song for some inspiration for a title—but the subject interested me more than any of the lines of the lyrics.

I thought, “Well, it’s a song about how, as a person, I have curiosity…” Since I was a child, I’ve always been curious about a variety of subjects and topics; I’m a ruminant in the sense that I’m a contemplative person. I like to think things over or chew the cud, as we say in English. So, I thought, “Curious ruminant… that’s a good title for the song.”

And a good title for the album, too.

Yes. I thought, “While I’m at it, maybe it’s a good title for the album…” I carried on in a similar vein of giving a more personal set of lyrics that were reflecting my own viewpoints, my own thoughts, and my own emotions on a variety of subjects. And so, lyrically, it’s a bit more of a personal album—but as an album, musically speaking, it’s very much a band album.

How so? The perception most people have is that you’re in control.

It’s very much a band album on which the guys in the band are very much playing in a, you know, it’s a rock band—but that’s okay. It’s a rock album but with personal lyrics. And the guys in the band don’t read my lyrics anyway, for some reason, so it doesn’t matter. It won’t worry them.

Jethro Tull remains consistent on the full-length album front when most bands of your age don’t bother. Are you unimpacted by the awful state of the music industry?

Well, my relationship with record companies since the very beginning has always been a very positive and rich relationship of mutual benefits. I have no bad stories or experiences in regard to any of the record companies that I’ve worked with—and that applies today.

So, your record company generally supports full albums when most bands are releasing singles or EPs?

I mean… when I thought last May, “Oh, you know, maybe there’s a new album coming,” the first thing I did as soon as I started to work was call the recording company boss. I said, “Look, you know, would you be interested in another Jethro Tull album for release in 2025?”

He said, “Yeah, sure. What kind of thing would you think it’s going to be?” I said, “Well, I have no idea… I’m just starting to think about it now.” So, he said, “Well, that’s fine. Whatever you want, you know, whatever it turns out to be, we’ll be very happy to, you know, release it.”

That’s a bit of a luxury that most bands don’t have, though you’ve certainly earned it.

That’s the way it’s always been. You know, record companies get a finished product from me, including the artwork, and they just put it out. I’ve had that kind of relationship with everybody, from the early Chrysalis record, and Warner Brothers in the USA, Island Records in the UK, and through the EMI years, and then, the Warner Music years now.

And, of course, this album is the third album with a subsidiary of Sony Records called Inside Out [Music], who are a German company that was sold to Sony some years ago. So, we have the distribution and marketing of Sony behind us, but this kind of boutique label identity is similar to the early Chrysalis records, where I tend to deal with the same few people all the time. It’s more of a personal relationship.

While listening back to Curious Ruminant, more so than your last few albums, I noticed that the overall sound of the album harkens back to Jethro Tull’s ‘70s era. Was that intentional?

It’s just how it developed when I started working on arrangements and ideas, you know? I wanted the songs to not all sound the same, so having some different instruments was a good idea. And trying to make sure the tempos were different, the keys of the songs were all different, and the general mood and dynamics were different.

It sounds like maybe your intent, or how you heard it, doesn’t quite line up with how I heard it—which is okay since music is subjective.

You know… I wanted to make an album of varied music—but I don’t overthink it. It comes very naturally and organically for me to come up with an idea of a song. The song kind of tells me what it wants to be. I listen, as a record producer, you know, to that early phase of the song…

And what do you tend to hear while listening?

It kind of speaks to me and says, “You know, I think I want to be like this,” or “I want to be like that.” And it’s my job, as a producer, to try and make that come true in terms of the way I work with the other band members and the parts that they evolve and add to the music.

We touched on the perception of Jethro Tull earlier, which is that you’re in charge. If that’s the case, what’s your relationship with your band like—especially since they don’t read your lyrics?

Oh, they don’t actually read any of them. [laughs] They don’t read any of them unless they have some vocal harmonies to sing live onstage for performances. But they, you know, they work in the way that we’ve done for, you know, whatever it is now… for more than 20 years that we’ve been working together, which is a way that we all mutually understand.

And that is?

We don’t have to try too hard. It’s a musical relationship that is one born out of the initial period of learning about each other and how we work into a more comfortable familiarity. We can almost second-guess what each other is going to do. That’s the way we work.