After 24 studio albums and almost 60 years with Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson’s legacy looks safe even before you factor in his not inconsiderable solo output. Tull’s latest album, Curious Ruminant, fulfils the contractual stipulations of their three-album deal with German prog label InsideOutMusic. But, unlike 2022’s The Zealot Gene and 2023’s RökFlöte, it’s not a concept album and feels weightier, closer to home.
“This is a record where you’ll see the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ more often than is usual in Jethro Tull lyrics,” Anderson confirms. “It’s not entirely introspective, but it is a more personal set of views, observations and feelings about various topics. I wanted to be a little more heart-on-sleeve.”
Those “various topics” include songs about audience and performer, about bereavement, avarice and betrayal. Curious Ruminant is rather special; a welcome return to the folky, yet heavy Tull sound that many of us first fell for back in the 70s.
Does Anderson see the record as a milestone, too?
“Not really,” he says levelly. “It’s just a collection of songs, in the same way that Aqualung was a collection of songs.”
No fanfare, then, and no histrionics. Anderson is too long in the tooth for gushing self-promotion, even when he’s arguably made his best record in some time. Dressed in a countryman’s padded black gilet over a grey sweatshirt, he exudes pragmatism instead. Deadlines get met, boxes get ticked, and if you happen to like his latest album, that’s good, too.
Although both Curious Ruminant’s opening song Puppet And The Puppet Master and the title track begins with a few seconds of melancholic piano, the album as a whole is a shape-shifting, folk rock tour de force. Its heavier elements are part-fired by the fine guitar work of relative newcomer Jack Clark, more of whom shortly. The prognoscenti will also doubtless salivate at the shifting moods and gears of Drink From The Same Well, which at 16-minutes-plus is the longest Jethro Tull song since 1975’s Baker St Muse.
“Yes. Or before that, Thick As A Brick [1972],” notes Anderson. “For me, this new record epitomises what Jethro Tull arrangements are like on a good day: dynamic and versatile. There are a lot of contrasts, too.”
Regarding the album’s title, Curious Ruminant, Anderson explains that it refers to him and his ongoing thirst for knowledge, rather than any inquisitive, cud-chewing cow or sheep.
“It goes back to my early teenage years,” he says. “I always enjoyed learning stuff outside of an English grammar school’s normal curriculum. I loved fantasy and surrealism, and I was a sponge when it came to the heady days of late-fifties and early-sixties science fiction. Before I got into music, that was what inspired me to be thoughtful. Maybe my ability to write songs was innate, but the sci-fi stuff couldn’t have done any harm. I think it sharpened the pencil, as it were. I still like to learn something new every day. I remain a curious ruminant. These days I have more time to cogitate.”
Currently, the line-up setting Anderson’s cogitations to music comprises him, bassist David Goodier, keyboard player John O’Hara, drummer Scott Hammond and the aforementioned guitarist Jack Clark. Tull’s frontman talks at length about their last three albums having featured three different guitarists (Florian Opahle on The Zealot Gene, Joe Parrish on RökFlöte, and now Clark on Curious Ruminant) before outlining the new man’s credentials.
“This is Jack’s first LP with us, but he had already played with Jethro Tull a number of times. He stood in for David Goodier when David was having surgery, and then for John O’Hara, covering some of his keyboard ground, but on second guitar. Turns out Jack’s a really good lead player, too. On this record he impressed me with intelligent, measured guitar solos, which have lots of semi-quavers in the right places, but Jack’s not afraid to hang on a note, either. That was something I impressed upon him when he first joined: ‘If you have a sixteen-bar guitar solo, please don’t turn into Yngwie Malmsteen or Joe Satriani.’”
The spectacular solo that Clark plays on Puppet And The Puppet Master is a case in point; it’s a sudden shot in the arm for Tull’s trademark chamber folk. The song explores the often symbiotic relationship between performer and audience, a topic Anderson also touched upon on the title track of another rather personal Tull LP, 1975’s Minstrel In The Gallery.
“It’s an interesting notion as to who is pulling the strings,” he says. “Are you giving the audience the emotional wherewithal to react? Or do you depend on them to be able to perform? I think it varies from performer to performer. But I’m not particularly thinking about me or the audience when I’m on stage. I’m just doing a two-hour aerobic workout in my own personal gym. That isn’t to say that the audience doesn’t matter enormously, of course. But I prefer people sitting quietly in their seats, paying attention. I appreciate it if they show their approval or otherwise at the end of the song rather than during it.”
It’s daunting to imagine the hours Anderson must have put in to get Curious Ruminant over the line. Writing all of the lyrics and almost all of the music, doing the vocals, playing multiple instruments, producing, undertaking the record’s stereo mix (The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord has again handled the 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos mixes), and doing all the album’s press interviews and promotion. Control freak, or just an admirable surety of vision? Probably the latter, actually. Besides, who would know better than Ian Anderson how a Jethro Tull album should proceed?
Anderson is also an avid photographer, and has a particular love for Leica cameras. When chatting about new, global warming-aware song Savannah Of Paddington Green – ‘Compare us to lemmings, death wish contemplation’, runs part of its lyric – he explains that he took photographs for Curious Ruminant’s sleeve, which in some way illustrate each of its songs.
“I took some photos of Paddington Green,” he says. “It’s always been a place I’ve felt an attachment to, because when I travel to London from Wiltshire my train comes in at Paddington Station. The song imagines a dystopian future where Paddington Green has become a stretch of unpopulated savannah in the wake of climate change. What might become of such places when they are devoid of people?”
Elsewhere on Curious Ruminant, Stygian Hand sees Anderson imagine a late-night encounter with some evil-intentioned stranger after taking a walk through unfamiliar streets. Is the song based on personal experience?
“I’ve not been accosted or mugged, but I’m mindful of where I walk and when these days. There have certainly been times where, walking back to my hotel late at night after a concert, I’ve felt I was being followed and have been concerned enough to make a sharp turn into a more populated thoroughfare while keeping my hand on my dignity and my wallet.”
And we tend to feel more vulnerable as we get older…
“Indeed. You can’t run away as fast as you used to, and you probably can’t defend yourself. Worse, you no longer look like you can defend yourself.”
One of the most personal songs on Curious Ruminant almost didn’t make the cut. Interim Sleep, which Anderson has described as a song of comfort for the bereaved, began life as a poem, and was the last song recorded for the album. It seems to envisage some kind of afterlife through reincarnation: ‘Stations where trains start and stop on the separate journeys of our many lives.’
“At first I tried singing it as a melodic piece, but it didn’t have the gravitas or intimacy that I was looking for,” Anderson explains. “So I deleted the sung version and relied on a spoken vocal against a fairly minimal musical backdrop of acoustic guitar and flute. I wrote a poem about an imaginary situation in which I was the voice of the deceased writing to the bereaved person to comfort them.”
Long-term Jethro Tull fans might find it difficult not to read some kind of valedictory resonance into Interim Sleep. Wary of that line of questioning, perhaps, Anderson comes up with a dry account of the challenges to audio fidelity the eleventh-hour song presented to vinyl cutting engineers on a record which already clocked in at more than 25 minutes per side. He’s skilled at keeping his cards close to his chest, which is absolutely his prerogative.
Anderson has more to say about Drink From The Same Well, a song recognising that, despite our differences, we’re all mutually dependent in the face of climate change and had better learn to work together.
“Much of that one was written by me and our then-keyboardist Andrew Giddings back in 2007. It was originally conceived as a potential duet to be performed by me on western concert flute and renowned Indian classical flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia on the bansuri [Indian bamboo flute]. We sent it to Hariprasad’s son, who was also his manager, I think, but Hariprasad rejected it, although we did do some shows together in India and Dubai. We ended up playing an Indian raga together, which was Hariprasad’s preference. So I had to learn his thing, rather than him learning the piece I’d written for him.”
Why was it rejected?
“I don’t know. Maybe he was a bit nonplussed with my bamboo flute playing! But I thought it was rather good and I’d raised my game [laughs]. Anyway, my son James found the original multitrack on one of my old computers, and we built a new version around it that has words and singing. Some of Andy Giddings’s original keyboard part is still on there, plus we added more flute, bass, drums, cajon and guitars.”
As is well documented, Anderson’s ongoing curiosity also extends to helping out other, often younger, artists, whose records he will sometimes play on for free if he likes what he hears. For example, he contributed flute to two tracks on Irish singer-songwriter Louise Patricia Crane’s 2020 album Deep Blue, while more recently he brought flute and spoken-word passages to Opeth’s vaunted 2024 album The Last Will And Testament
How did Anderson come to work with the Swedish band?
“Opeth’s singer [Mikael Åkerfeldt] is a bit of a fan, I think. He’d been to a couple of Jethro Tull concerts in Stockholm, and was in touch with my son and asked if I would do something. I said okay, so long as it doesn’t involve learning some enormously complicated music! He sent a version where he demoed the spoken-word parts in his own voice, so I had plenty to go on, and he seemed happy with the end result. I often enjoy playing on other people’s records, and then forget that I’ve done so. Not because they aren’t memorable, but because I’m so caught up in my own musical chores.”
Interviewing Anderson, one notices that he always refers to his band as ‘Jethro Tull’, and never just ‘Tull’. There’s a pride there, a kind of formal dignity. Theirs is a vast and magnificent back catalogue, for sure, but for how much longer can Anderson keep adding to it?
“Who knows what the future holds?” he says. “I hope to be physically capable for a few more years and mentally capable beyond that. What I can tell you is that in terms of energy and commitment, I’m very far from wanting to retire. It would be foolish to say I have a new album planned for next year, though, because I haven’t written anything yet.
“In the months to come I may well get the itch again, call our record company and say: ‘How about another one?’ but it all depends how well Curious Ruminant does. If we do make another record it will necessarily have to be a bit different. I can imagine a reversal to something quite basic – not all the way back to our blues roots, but maybe something more stripped-down. I sometimes toy with the idea of a four-piece band.”
And what of more Tull reissues? Are there more in the pipeline?
“There are certainly a few more that Warner Music have the rights for and are intent on doing. Crest Of A Knave [1987] is being talked about and could have some changes for the better in the right hands. Something like Under Wraps [1984] I’d like to see improved upon, too, because there’s some really great playing on there, particularly from [guitarist] Martin Barre.”
To borrow from the title of one of Jethro Tull’s biggest hits, what’s clear is that Anderson is not living in the past, but the now. He’s a curious ruminant, still milking life for all it has to offer.
Curious Ruminant is out now.
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