“It’s something that concerns me”: how Jethro Tull predicted the future with ‘Locomotive Breath’
One of the most interesting things about music is its potential. This doesn’t just mean, in a sense, that songs have the potential to be number one and go worldwide, but also in terms of encapsulating feelings. There are a lot of musicians who write concept pieces, creating a narrative as opposed to writing from the heart. However, when people write as a form of expression, the potential of a song takes on a different form.
This is because a lot of songwriters don’t enter into a track with a specific theme or topic in mind. Sometimes, they hear a melody and an idea comes to them. Other times, they can start writing with an abstract subject in mind and then wind up going somewhere completely different. It means that random thoughts from an afternoon can end up being immortalised, and one-off observations regarding the future are given time to marinate, meaning audiences decades down the line can look back at tracks and decide whether or not they were accurate.
This is what happened with Jethro Tull’s frontman, Ian Anderson. Anderson was a man of many talents, great at guitar, playing the flute, being a frontman, and writing exciting and engaging music. Jethro Tull never had many limits when it came to what they wanted to write about, and their songs ended up touching upon real-world emotions, moral dilemmas between religion and God, and ponderings of the future. Considering the latter, it turns out soothsayer is another string that Ian Anderson could add to his bow of talents.
‘Locomotive Breath’ is a track from Jethro Tull’s fourth and most successful album, Aqualung. When Anderson started writing the lyrics for the song, he didn’t have a specific direction in mind; however, once the track began gaining traction, he realised he was penning his concerns about the future.
“When I wrote it, I wasn’t deliberately setting out to write a piece of music on a particular subject,” he said, “But it evolved during the writing process into being not terribly specific but about the issues of overcrowding – the rather claustrophobic feel of a lot of people in a limited space.” Anderson isn’t referring to a specific city or place but the earth as a whole. “The idea of the incessant unstoppable locomotive being a metaphor for seemingly the unstoppable population expansion on planet earth.”
Given that the track was written in 1971, Anderson really hit the nail on the head in terms of the population growing, as since then, those who occupy the planet have almost doubled in number. Anderson recognises this as a good thing, given that increased life represents people being happy and starting families, as well as advancements in medical technology. Still, it doesn’t stop the frontman from being concerned about the issue of overpopulation in the grand scheme of things.
In a recent interview, he addressed the topic again: “The idea of population planning and management is something that I think we ought to be thinking about a lot more than we do. Does that mean I think we should sterilise everybody after the age of 30? No, of course not. The size of the family you want to have is going to be your choice. But, you should make that choice knowingly, wisely and responsibly.”
