Ian Anderson to release sequel to TAAB, April 2012

My guess is that will be it. The original looked like an old school local newspaper, so I guess they decided to make this one look like a current local newspaper's website.

 

http://www.j-tull.com/
Click on pages:
http://www.stcleve.com/ Local news, sports...more

 

That'll be like you're guessin'

http://www.stcleve.com/

Hello the whole forum

 

Well whatever the music sounds like, the sense of humor is intact.
That's a good thing!

 

audio crazies - dig the Steven Wilson article.
http://www.stcleve.com/community.html

 

G'dayt,

Is there any more information about the audio on the DVD? I'm assuming it will be DTS. It would be nice to get hi-res lossless stereo ...

--Geoff

 

I'll give it a whirl it's not like it would "taint" the original (it's still there) and the challenge thrown down by Derek Shulman (try it, you'll like it) seems to have gotten Ian's creative juices flowing (at least on the page) again.

It could be interesting.


As with all things though a healthy amount of skepticism is good along with cautious optimism.

 

http://www.stcleve.com/contacts.html
The content of StCleve.com ©is protected under the copyright controls of the United Kingdom, enforced by Web-secure-it Ltd, UK. Unauthorised users of text and images will be prosecuted really quite seriously, without delay or remorse. Extradition, a distinct possibility


Should I laugh, or should I cry

And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be.
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?
I see you shuffle in the courtroom with
your rings upon your fingers
and your downy little sidies
and your silver-buckle shoes.
Playing at the hard case,
you follow the example of the comic-paper idol
who lets you bend the rules. -Ian Anderson

 

Meh. Ian Anderson's voice is awful these days. The dude needs to hang it up.

 

(including a 5.1 mix and stereo in high res) - Steven Wilson

That's all I've got, so far.

 

http://www.examiner.com/classic-har...nderson-to-release-sequel-to-thick-as-a-brick
The tour will begin in the UK and visit several European countries in the spring and summer. It will wrap with two American legs spanning September, October and November.

 

The radio had announced the TAAB shows as Tull shows. I'm disappointed and not planning to go to see Ian tour them with his solo band. I just went to Martin's cite, and he's touring playing Tull material with Noyce and Perry.

 

No interest at all from me. *SNORE*

I absolutely LOVED Tull in the 70s, had no curiosity thru the 80s till 'Crest of a Knave', and I liked that somewhat.

Then I saw Tull in '92 or '93 and Ian's voice was COMPLETELY shot, the band was lackluster IMO, and the only thing that interests me is the old catalog re-worked. And THAT is HIGH on my list, albeit only up to Songs from the Wood. A mere 35 +/- years ago.

Now as far as a spoken audio interview or retrospective....I'd be interested.


Pitiful huh ?

 

The announcement for the TAAB tour never said it would be a Tull tour (although they kept it pretty quiet that it wouldn't be).

 

Remember This

http://www.examiner.com/classic-har...nderson-to-release-sequel-to-thick-as-a-brick
Derek Shulman, the former front man and singer from one of Anderson's own favorite progressive rock groups, Gentle Giant, pushed the musician in the direction of a sequel. Shulman went on to a very successful career as a record company executive, and in 2011 he challenged Anderson to write the new material, which follows Gerald Bostock to the age of 50 in 2012.



Track listing for Thick as a Brick2: Whatever Happened To Gerald Bostock?

1. From A Pebble Thrown
2. Pebbles Instrumental
3. Might-have-beens
4. Upper Sixth Loan Shark
5. Banker Bets, Banker Wins
6. Swing It Far
7. Adrift And Dumfounded
8. Old School Song
9. Wootton Bassett Town
10. Power And Spirit
11. Give Till It Hurts
12. Cosy Corner
13. Shunt And Shuffle
14. A Change Of Horses
15. Confessional
16. Kismet In Suburbia
17. What-ifs, Maybes And Might-have-beens

 

TAABtoo - Taboo Whatever happened to Martin Barre?

 

It wasn't an ad, it was the dj mentioning it.

 

Given Shulman's influence, maybe track 10 should be titled Power and Glory.

 

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson On Thick As A Brick 2, The Grammys And More
By Evan Schlansky February 2nd, 2012 at 4:35 pm
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2...n-on-thick-as-a-brick-2-the-grammys-and-more/

On April 3, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson will release Thick As A Brick 2, the followup to 1972′s beloved prog opus Thick As A Brick (an album comprised of two long, interconnected songs). In this extensive interview, rock’s most famous flautist talks to American Songwriter about the sequel’s genesis, its parallels to the original, his distinctive vocal style, and whether or not he believes he can win another Grammy.

With the recent Aqualung reissue and now Thick As A Brick 2, this a pretty exciting time to be a Jethro Tull fan.

It’s a really exciting time for me too. Aqualung and Thick As A Brick are two of my favorite records for the simple reason that from an artistic and a personal songwriting point of view, they’re very different in terms of their musical and lyrical content. They both represent a period when I got brave enough to take a few risks with different topics, different subjects, and different ways of writing music.

So the two albums are very dear to me in sort of artistic sense. I have studiously avoided, over the years, to recreate Thick As A Brick, either in terms of playing it all on stage, or venturing down that slightly more prog-rock course of musical endeavor.

And I was pretty much maintaining that position until sometime late in 2010, when I met up with an old acquaintance by the name of Derek Shulman. He used to be the singer of the band Gentle Giant, a prog-rock band that had quite a bit of success in the late ’70s. He then went on to be a successful record producer in the USA, signing bands like Nickelback and others.

When I met him, he strongly suggested his idea of doing a sequel to Thick As A Brick, which I reacted to with my usual disdain and negative thoughts, but we had another conversation probably later on that year. Somehow the idea just popped up in a conversation about, “I wonder what the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock [Thick As A Brick's fictional protagonist] would be doing today. Would the fabled newspaper [seen in the album art] still exist?

It was the thought of bringing that idea into the current context. First of all, how do our lives develop? What chance encounters, what interventions shape our lives? It’s what we go through from childhood onwards. That, in itself, began to pose some interesting parallels with my own thinking about my own background, my development in school, my early career, my choice of doing things along the way.

So it suddenly coalesced, in a period of hours rather than days, into a full-blown concept for writing a new album. Once I had that, the whole picture changed. I thought, “I think I can do this.” I just kept it in the back of my mind until the end of January last year and started to try to evolve it as more of a detailed picture – just laying out the bones of it on a piece of paper. Then I started writing some lyrics and I already had one or two pieces of music by then that I thought I could bring into play and so I just kind of got on with it. Within about two weeks, I had the album pretty much done in the sense of the lyrics and the music.

I went off to Munich and spent the day with my guitar player friend. We made some demos of the whole thing in a few hours. Then I came back and spent another day in the studio home of our keyboard player and we started to work on the scores of that. We put it all into the software program called Sibelius, created a huge musical score of the whole album which was given out to the other band members in March last year.

Then we went on the road for six months and didn’t give it too much thought, other than we played two or three of the songs live on stage to try them out. The lyrics were changed a little bit and titles and things to avoid giving the game away to the public. We then went back to it at the end of November. We finished the Scandinavian tour, came back, took a few days off, and then convened for rehearsals. We did about a week or so of rehearsal and ten days in the studio and then a few days of mixing.

We finished my part of it all right about the 3rd or 4th of December. Then we spent a few days working with Stephen Wilson, the man behind the band Porcupine Tree who remixed the Aqualung album last year and he remixed the Thick As A Brick album too, ready for release, or re-release later this year. It was all wrapped up and done well before Christmas. That’s the story.

How does that compare to the amount of time it took you to come up with the music and lyrics for the original album?

It’s all identical. I think the only difference is that with Thick As A Brick 2, I wrote it all and then there was a period of six months before we recorded it. With Thick As A Brick 1, I was kind of writing it and rehearsing it pretty much on the same day. I would write the music in the morning, go to the rehearsal room in the afternoon, work with the guys into the evening, and then we did that every day for about ten days. Then we went and recorded it in Morgan Studios in London in a period of about ten days. We spent a few days mixing it and that was done. It was pretty much the same amount of intense work that’s involved in this one.

So yeah, remarkable similarities really, in terms of the band being in the studio working together playing it together almost like a live experience. It was extensively all-together, not fragmented because it’s a big piece of music with a lot of joins, sections, reiterations, developments, and utilizing themes that crop up a few times in different ways on the album. It was the kind of work that, as musicians, you can get your teeth into. You can sort of tackle it in a bigger way. You’re not just learning a four-minute song. It’s 50 odd minutes of music.

It was quite an intense time for all the musicians just as it was back in 1972. Just like in 1972, I think a lot more time was spent doing the artwork, marketing, and promotional blends. The newspaper is now online. It’s a community Internet magazine really for the imaginary small town communities.

So are all the songs connected? Are there breaks in between on the new record?

Well, there are ID points. I wrote the music very much for the idea that there could be ID points where you were able to listen to it in separate pieces, so in this day in age of iTunes and digital retailers, you can find it. So there are ID points. I don’t really like to call them songs or tracks but I decided I would treat it kind of like songs.

But in reality, things repeat and develop so it’s not really a collection of songs. It is more of a continuous flow piece of music. One thing leads to another. But you can group areas into certain subjects and topics, where two or three pieces kind of hold together on the same idea for a while. I don’t really like to talk about them being songs or tracks, but I recognize the fact that other people do. I kind of constructed it in order to put these ID points on so when you hit the forward button on your player or computer or CD player or iPod, you can at least go forward or backward to the section that you want to hear. Of course, you can buy them on iTunes as separate pieces – you don’t have to buy the whole album.

That would be kind of ridiculous though.

Tell that to Pink Floyd. They somewhat famously recently refused to let Dark Side Of The Moon be unbundled for iTunes and said it could only be sold as a full piece. You have to buy the whole album or nothing at all. It seems to me not realistic. I think if you go and look at the majority of great classical works, you’ll find them unbundled in one form or another on iTunes or another provider. So I don’t see why we shouldn’t be doing that now with contemporary pop music, even if it is a bigger work. I think you’ve got to make it accessible, practically speaking, to people who listen to it in terms of today’s equipment.

I mean anything is better than the awful noisy empty grooves between tracks – lifting the needle and trying to find the track again, only to hear those awful noises and realize you’ve just taken another 20 plays off the life of your vinyl record by dropping the needle in the wrong place, or too clumsily. So we should be grateful for the digital age.

The original Thick As A Brick was meant as a parody of prog-rock, right?

It remains as a parody of the concept prog-rock album of its day. Because at that point, there were several bands producing rather elaborate and sometimes pompous, overblown productions of music, which were sometimes a mixture of great ideas and too much showing off. Those were bands like Yes and King Crimson and the early Genesis. it wasn’t my favorite kind of music, but I enjoyed quite a lot of it. They were great musicians and did some great stuff, but it just seemed a convenient time to create a bit of a spoof of that grandiose concept album.

So I wrote something that was designed to be just that, from the starting premise of an 8-year-old boy writing this piece of rather impenetrable and surreal poetry. I mean if you buy into that, then you buy into the whole thing. I thought the joke was kind of obvious, but I guess for a lot of people it wasn’t so obvious. If it was, they didn’t really care. They just liked the idea of it anyways. So it didn’t really have to be explained unduly and in some countries, I suppose people still think of Thick As A Brick as being literally what it says on the packaging. But that was always going to happen to some little degree.

I would imagine most people understand that it is a spoof. It’s a fabricated and observed notion. But the follow up album is based on an extrapolation of that idea, not just Gerald Bostock but anyone – you know, what happens to you in life. It’s perhaps a rather more somber and serious, sometimes more dark, follow up to the original Thick As A Brick. It is what you expect 40 years down the line. It’s a grown-up piece of work. It has some dark and unhappy moments in there. It’s not all fun and games.

Online at StCleve.com, it’s more lighthearted and definitely the spoof every bit as it was back then of parochial country life. In fact, I will be inviting our fans to participate in a couple weeks time of writing their own stories for StCleve.com as correspondents We’re going to let some people appear online and they can write their own stories. We’ll pick a few of those each week and put them on our website to join in the fantasy of parochial country life in England. We’ll have to edit out the bad words and inappropriate photographs. We have to remember our responsibilities and we won’t let it overstep the mark of tastefulness.

This album is not an official Jethro Tull release. Is that correct?

Well, you can call it what you want really. I don’t mind. I’m happily not in the position where I have to label things too carefully. It is what it is, what it says. It’s my album and that’s indeed the original Thick As A Brick, something I wrote – nobody else did, it was only me. So I guess I’m just having a slightly Roger Waters selfish moment and making people realize I am the author of this, not the members of the band that were there in 1972. Three of them don’t play music anymore. It was never an option to rekindle the musical flames of having the actual musicians that played on it 40 years ago play on this. That was never going to be an option. So I felt this was something that probably deserved to feature my own name rather more prominently, and so it does.

Did the idea of ever doing a sequel to Aqualung occur to you? That almost seems like an easier choice.

Well Aqualung is a collection of songs, and I work in that genre all the time. Indeed, we’ll be working on some more individual songs this year. So Aqualung is just a collection of stuff. It’s some good songs, many of which we continue to play today. That’s a different sort an album. But if you’re talking about a single, more conceptual piece that offers a much bigger, more tangible challenge that I avoided like the plague for a long time and finally succumbed to the challenge of it during the last year. Aqualung is a different kettle of fish all together.

In a sense, you’re messing with your own legacy by creating a sequel to a beloved album. Do you feel any trepidation about how it will be received?

I’m pretty realistic about it. I think it’s going to result in a deafening response of silent disapproval from the majority of people, who just frankly couldn’t care less. That’s my expectation. I’d be very happy if it meets with approval, not only of hardcore Jethro Tull friends, but a broader audience. I’d be delighted, but I’m not expecting it. This is 2012 and as far as we’re aware, concept progressive rock albums are not the flavor of this decade.

But having said that, I have felt in the last couple years when I’ve been out and about in different parts of the world that there is a new audience for so called prog-rock. It’s an audience that’s basically in their teens and early twenties. Many of them seem to be in the Latin countries – in South and Central America, and Spain, and Italy – not the places I imagined. I would have imagined in prog-rock was still alive and well, it would be in the USA or UK or Germany. But I would have to say; in USA, UK, and Germany I think it’s less appreciated than it is in many other countries of the world. Perhaps in the three major territories record sales wise, I think it’ll be a hard slog for us. But this will probably sell a lot of copies in Brazil. Well, it won’t actually sell because people will just rip it off the Internet and not pay me a dime. So I’m gonna lose money on it, but there you go.

I’m excited to hear it.

Well, it really does sound good. I’m very pleased with it. I think it’s one of those things that when you elect to do something, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, as one of your presidents famously suggested, there is a huge sense of achievement when you think you’ve actually pulled it off. So for me and the other musicians, there is a definite feeling of “we did it.”

But it would be wrong of me to assume that the rest of the world is gonna love it. I’m sure lots of people are gonna think it’s terrific, but it’s not the easiest ride and I think if anybody was gonna try and make a concept prog-rock album come alive in 2012 in a conspicuous way, then I’d be one of the people who could possibly step up to the plate and deliver. I like to think that I have, but I’ll let you and everybody else be the judge of that.

Your singing style is very distinctive in the way that you chain notes together. Where does that come from?

I have no idea. What I do know, from the occasion that I work with other people who have sung some of my songs, is that people do find it quite hard to get the phrasing and even to get some of the melodies I use. They’re not so typical of the genre pop and rock music. So it’s not easy stuff. As a guitar player – and I’m not a great guitar player – but what I play apparently seems to be quite difficult for a lot of other musicians to copy.

I mean, “Thick As A Brick” being a case in point. It’s actually quite hard to play that line. A lot of people give it a go, but they don’t really quite manage to make it work. I remember the guitar player of Red Hot Chili Peppers telling me how long he’d had to struggle to play the intro to “Thick As A Brick” and how he was so impressed with Martin Barre’s guitar playing skills. He was determined he would master it. I told him it wasn’t Martin Barre playing it. It was me.

These things that you can do – there are probably some things you can do that I would think, “wow, how does he do that?” I could never get close to it. We all have our little talents and skills and quirks and things that we somehow manage to master. Most of us, at some level, manage to do that and we confound other people because they can’t figure it out. But it doesn’t make us better or worse than them. We just have our little idiosyncratic specialties. Yours might be washing up. You might be a whiz in the kitchen at washing up and putting the dishes away after a meal. I’m sure you’d be much better than I am. The chances are you’re probably better at football or tennis or swimming.

This year’s Grammy Awards are coming up. Will you be watching?

I never quite followed what the Grammys are. I know what it’s supposed to be about. It’s another one of those award ceremonies that I’m afraid I pay little attention to.

Jethro Tull is famous for winning in the hard rock category.

We were nominated in the category of best hard rock/metal performance. Nobody paid a blind bit of notice, because basically they thought, “Well, there’s no way they’re gonna win. It’s gonna be Metallica.” So no one actually paid any attention when we were nominated. I scarcely did myself because I was told by the record company, “you’re never gonna win it, because Metallica is the super new hot band and they are heavy metal.” So we didn’t give it too much thought. It was only when we actually won it that I thought, “wait a minute. We aren’t heavy metal at all.”

We got given the Grammy for being a bunch of nice guys who had never won a Grammy before and the 6,000 voting members of the National Academy of Recording Artists and sciences decided on their infinite wisdom that they should give us a little nod and a wink for being not eligible in the best male vocalist category or the sexy female with the longest legs category. Since they didn’t have a category for the best one-legged flute player, we kind of just got voted into something, however improbable, and that was the end of it.

Well, that wasn’t the end of it. Poor old Alice Cooper had to go on stage and collect it on our behalf. He got booed off the stage, I think, by fans of Metallica and members of the media, who possibly quite rightly thought we shouldn’t have been there.

Maybe they’ll create a category for Thick As A Brick 2 next year, like best sequel record.

[Laughs] Yeah, I think they’ll have to invent a new category for it. I’m not quite sure what the categories for the Grammys are these days, but I doubt that Thick As A Brick would qualify for any.

 

Thanks for posting that.

This is gonna be AWESOME!

 

Oh, and by the way, for all of you don't-like-anything-this-band-did-after-the-seventies naysayers... When Ian Anderson records a sequal to TAAB with any band, that band IS Jethro Tull! (Much like when the President of the United States flys on any airforce aircraft, that aircraft IS Airforce One!)

 

So for the 'sheer fact' that you'd call this JETHRO TULL, an fan of a particular era of theirs should not naysay a contemporary release on that observation alone ?

Is it OK to not like "Too Old to RnR and too young to die" ? THAT was Jethro Tull in the 70s and I don't care for it at all. For you to insinuate that all respect and gratitude be given to Ian for this endeavor is nothing but BLIND FANBOYDOM. I really have no interest in this, other than the Derek Shulman association, but will listen to it when an opportunity arises, if it does. I won't go out of my way.

My favorite all-time band, Gentle Giant, put out a record I ABHORE !! Giant for a Day. And THAT was the real Gentle Giant. Does that make me less of a fan ? To GfaD lovers, I guess so. Hmmmmm....

 

Without Martin Barre, The President of Jethro Tull deserves to be impeached.

 

THIS!!!!

 

That was a great interview, he really is a cool guy.