The Jethro Tull album Ian Anderson called a “step too far”
Making any progressive rock song is never going to be easy. Outside of trying to put every genre you can possibly think of under one roof, you also have to worry about making sure that you still end up having something original in your arsenal instead of playing every single style that’s in your record collection. Ian Anderson certainly had the discipline to make such an album, but Passion Play was the moment where their ambition didn’t exactly match what they were doing.
By the time Anderson even got to work on the record, he had already experienced some of the earliest progressive rock eras of all time. Even though Aqualung wouldn’t have been called progressive by many fans these days, his ability to tell vivid stories across every song while still making a flute look somewhat cool onstage is an absolute god-level move from any artist.
At the same time, even the band could tell that the scene was getting more than a little bit saturated when they hit it big. Sure, they could play fast and name their favourite movement of any of their favourite classical pieces without stuttering, but there were only so many places you could go before you found yourself getting out-lapped by everyone and their brother, who also had a prog band.
So, why not poke some fun at the genre? Outside of being a brilliant piece of writing, Thick as a Brick was also meant to be a tongue-in-cheek critique of just how out of hand some of the music had gotten over the years. Since the entire album was “written” from the perspective of a child, it’s not like they were looking to take the biggest songs of their generation and use them to speak to you.
If that kind of extravagance worked once, that meant Anderson had free reign for what happened on A Passion Play. The only problem is that when you’re trying to make an album that comprises everything you can think of, you start to go on for too long before someone starts to ask themselves, ‘What the hell is the main idea of the song?’.
As it turned out, Anderson didn’t know, telling Louder, “[It was] the ‘step too far’ album. We decamped to the Château d’Hérouville in France, where Elton [John] had recorded, and had a rotten time: technical issues, gastric bugs… we just wanted to go home. So we did and had a frantic few weeks of writing a new album. Two pieces made it to the War Child album, and one or two morphed into something more sophisticated, but they never came to light on that album”.
Even though the album contains some fractured pieces, you can still draw a little bit of a line to see where everything connects. If anything, this album works better for what it inspired than for how it was received upon release.
Steve Harris of Iron Maiden was known to be a huge fan of the album, and when working on the grand epics in the metal outfit, you can see where he first got the itch to dream bigger than the usual rock fodder. Jethro Tull might not always be everyone’s first choice when talking about prog rock, but A Passion Play still feels like a nice way for potential artists to see where they can go when they’ve exhausted the usual rock and roll song format.
