The Jethro Tull song that made Ian Anderson cringe: “Loathed and detested”
The name of the genre says it all: progressive rock. When a band is trying to do something forward-thinking, forging ahead of the rest into the future, there are bound to be mistakes. What is experimentation if not facing up to the fear of failure and trying it out anyway? That’s the ethos a band like Jethro Tull was built on, but that doesn’t mean Ian Anderson’s musical legacy is free from regret.
It comes with the territory. If you’re going to try to be on the cutting edge, sometimes you are going to falter. For a band like Jethro Tull, who, alongside acts like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and even Genesis, were trying to reshape rock into something new, they had to get comfortable with simply trying things out and even more comfortable with them not working.
All in all, Anderson is comfortable with that. He looks back at his band’s career with pride or at least an understanding of that younger version of himself and the things he was trying to achieve. He can now see things like the 1969 album Stand Up as a huge “step forward musically” for the band that resulted in a “landmark” moment. He can also look back and see the moments they faltered and failed, able to respect that side of things too.
Nevertheless, if there’s one song Anderson regrets, it’s the moment the band didn’t so much falter on their mission to be progressive but totally abandoned it.
“Two or three times I have in the early days tried to write something that was deliberately in a more pop context,” Anderson told Songfacts. “’Living in the Past’ was written specifically as a single,” he added, as that 1969 single, which later found a home on 1972’s Living in the Past, was the band’s attempt at something more commercial.
Still, there was an oddness to it that was always inevitable with the band. “Being in 5/4 time signature, it wasn’t obviously the choice of a listening public to have a complex time signature,” he explained, but still, the mission was to make a hit, “I tried to work within that framework of doing something that set out with a non-common time signature, but would have some catchy appeal because of the musical rhymes and the title, and that succeeded.”
If there’s one thing Anderson regrets, it’s this, as when looking back, he only hears this attempt to write for the masses as a cringy moment where the band fumbled what made them interesting, special or, at least, what made them, them.
“To be honest, I’ve always loathed and detested that song. In fact, when it was first a hit, I used to hide in a corner and cringe,” he told Kerrang! Although their fans, and even the rest of the band, like the track, Anderson can’t get on board with it.
