The moment Ian Anderson stopped listening to music: “Never been a big listener”
They say, as you get older, you become less open to new things, reverting to old comforts, content with the familiarity of revisiting those you already know and love; case in point: Ian Anderson.
Anderson, like many of his peers, has always thought that categories and labels cheapen music. As a prog rock legend, his primary drive had always been creating genuine art with no care for the simplistic boxes people love to shoehorn it into. Immersed in folk, classical and jazz from early on, he shaped his sound around musical dynamics with no thought whatsoever to the commercial appeal of his music, and this also extends to his personal tastes.
While they occasionally linger at the threshold of “brutal, simplistic music”, as he once said of his guilty pleasures Motörhead and the Ramones, most of what he likes comes from a place deep down inside, from musicians he’d already heard from a young age, and as he got older, Anderson stopped searching for anything else, already content with the material he’d already heard before he even became a major name.
It’s pretty strange for a musician to admit they’re not that into music, especially one as culturally important as Anderson; it also feels impossible for someone who’s the very face of prog rock innovation to have no interest in his own discipline. While it’s probably not as dramatic as that, per se, and resembles the same relationship that Linda Ronstadt has with musical tastes, it’s hard to say that his ignorance of new music doesn’t feel a little surprising, and it’s made even more startling by the admission that he’s not all that into music at all.
“I’ve never really been a big music listener, and I’m not a music fan in the sense that I listen to music to relax or have fun,” he told Markus Brandstetter, adding that he realised he’d “listened to enough music” in the early 1970s, and then in the mid-1970s, “I stopped listening to music”. Granted, he didn’t stop listening to music altogether; he just stopped actively discovering new things, caught in his familiar cycle of Handel, Beethoven, Muddy Waters, and so on.
His reasoning, he explained, was that he doesn’t get anything new from modern music, because he can either trace the “musical lineage” or because the lyrics are “pretty simplistic”, and even then, he only really sticks some music on when “I’m on a plane and trying to distract myself from the turbulence”.
Anderson has been pretty forthcoming in the past about his musical influences, so he’s not completely opposed to the concept of music itself, but it has to be something truly groundbreaking that pulls him back in, like Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, or a pivotal founding father, like Graham Bond.
He also explained that, most of the time, he’s either writing or performing his own music, which limits a lot of the free time he’d spend listening to other people’s material, but, all things considered, it’s clear that he doesn’t really get anything from it anyway. You can say that beneath it all, Anderson only truly cares about what he has to offer to the rest of the world.
