The one musician Ian Anderson will never get tired of: “I don’t want to sound too snobbish”
Ian Anderson didn’t spend his life trying to make songs that would become museum pieces.
He liked the idea of keeping the audience guessing every single time Jethro Tull made a new record, and even if their music wasn’t the most accessible thing in the world, it was worth it for him to make tunes that made people look at the genre in a new way. And if you’re going to have that kind of vision from the moment that you start making music, you’re going to need a healthy musical diet behind you.
Not every song that Anderson listened to was ever meant to be strictly rock and roll, and some of his biggest musical influences tended to come from the classical world. Which makes sense when you listen to Thick as a Brick. The entire record feels like one classical piece of music stretched out over one record, and the fact that he could write all the music for it while still coming back to certain themes is something that sounds like it was lifted directly out of some classical composition.
But he also had a deep love of what the other eccentrics of the music world had been doing. Sgt Peppers had been a game-changer for him when he started, and he felt that Pink Floyd deserved the credit for helping prog rock come to fruition on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but the discipline that Anderson had still came from the age when composers meticulously crafted their tunes.
Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi remembered being shellshocked when he learned that the band rehearsed early in the morning for hours until they had their songs right, but that’s how Anderson thought about his music. His heroes didn’t just wing it when it came to performing many of their pieces live, and when you listen to Beethoven, you can hear the kind of tone that Anderson was going for.
A lot of those symphonies couldn’t be any more perfect if the classical icon had tried, and even though that style of music was considered old for most musicians at that time, Anderson was never going to see the day where he grew tired of it, saying, “I do want to sound snobbish – there’s nothing wrong with being snobbish when what you’re being snobbish about is the gold dust of our musical worth.”
Adding, “Beethoven to me is the consummate classical composer. He learnt stuff from Bach and Mozart, but he came at a time when he could bring all of his many influences together and not only from the classical tradition.”
And it’s not like the rest of the prog world didn’t follow in Anderson’s footsteps, either. The biggest names in the genre were known to make gargantuan songs that lasted an entire side of a record, and when you listen to guitarists like Alex Lifeson and Steve Howe, both of them had a healthy respect for classical guitar whenever they decided to make their more advanced fingerpicking pieces.
That kind of influence isn’t even reserved for prog music, either. The metal world wouldn’t have been the same without classical music, and for everyone who was hooked on Yngwie Malmsteen back in the day, they were learning the kinds of scales that were centuries old and pulled from some of Beethoven’s greatest works whenever they went through a diminished scalar run.
So while classical music is practically poison for anyone looking to get a pop hit, it’s never been a bad word to Anderson. It’s always been about how the melodies interact with each other, and if someone could make something sound heavenly throughout a symphony, that was all that mattered.
