The one singer Ian Anderson said was always too boring
It was going to take a lot more than a typical rock and roll song to impress Ian Anderson.
Jethro Tull did have a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour whenever they worked on some of their records, but none of their projects would have happened without his ingenuity when it came to getting the right structure of every one of their songs. There needed to be something more than a typical blues progression, but even people who worked outside of the typical four chords weren’t exactly getting the green light from him every single time he heard their records.
Then again, Anderson wasn’t the kind of person to bat someone down for making simple pop music. That’s what made some of those early rock and roll songs sound so great in the first place, and it’s not like everyone was going to be flocking to a Chuck Berry tune if all they heard was a bunch of jazz chords sprinkled in between whatever other ideas that he had in the background. Any band needed to choose their battles when it came to complex stuff, and it’s not like Anderson needed to be complex all the time, either.
Some of his favourite rock and roll voices were always from people like Lou Gramm of Foreigner, and since he also had a deep love of what bands like The Beatles were doing during the Sgt Pepper, he definitely had a keen ear for what he loved in pop music. But there’s a fine line between doing something new and making something derivative, and he could cut through that with a knife every single time he heard a new artist coming out of the woodwork.
And that also applied to the throwback bands as well. Anderson did have his fair share of times, going all the way back to the era of classical music, when reinterpreting Bach’s ‘Bouree’ on one of Tull’s albums, but even the retro acts needed to be doing something different. The Stray Cats got there by having Brian Setzer’s brilliant guitar work, and Reverend Horton Heat took their Southern rock approach to the nth degree whenever they made their tunes, but the frontman drew the line at bringing back the old crooners.
There was certainly room for easy listening on the charts, but someone needed to be doing a little bit more than having a half-decent voice. Adele was a steamroller of emotion every single time she released one of her new albums, but compared to the true legends like Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, Anderson felt that the world didn’t need to hear what the likes of Michael Bublé were doing on the charts.
Buble did have a great voice for this kind of music, but it was far too generic for Anderson to pay any attention, saying, “I heard some really rather tiresome man on breakfast television this morning, Michael Buble, I think it was, talking about his latest single. He took great pains to explain how it was about the break-up of a relationship and said, ‘all my songs are about being in love or out of love, that’s what I do.’ I thought to myself: ‘How incredibly interesting. Not.’ How incredibly dull and boring, but it’s the stuff of so much.”
In all fairness, writing a love song doesn’t have to disqualify you from being a credible songwriter. The best artists of all time have written about infatuation, but compared to Anderson wanting to make some of the most extravagant prog rock that anyone had ever heard, Buble’s songbook seemed to be destined to be background music at wedding receptions rather than songs that people want to dig into.
The rest of the world might still flock to that kind of sound when they’re in the mood for it, but Anderson was more interested in giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted. History wasn’t built on someone copying their peers, and the best way for everyone to keep things moving was to keep thinking outside the box.
