He is an adventurous soul and one of the pioneering astronauts of progressive rock music whose self-described best work is written for himself, and whose global excursions and personal curiosities shape the sounds that are ultimately and graciously shared with the public.
The first time The Aquarian covered Jethro Tull was in 1971. It was a review for the career-defining concept album Aqualung. We described the LP as, “one of the finest records to be released this year and is proof to all the skeptics that Jethro Tull is one fine band.” (We must note that we continued that statement by adding this still-true notion: “Though, if you need further proof, check them out in concert. They are excellent.”)
A handful of years passed and the first cover story we did with the band arrived – it was in 1977 and Ian Anderson, whose face was plastered on our inked-up pages, was just turning 30 years old. There have since been many more features, cover stories, reviews, and events written about in our pages, and we couldn’t be more honored to have followed the illustrious, existential, and engaging musical career of this unique act. Today, Ian Anderson is 77, laidback for the most part, but spry and vibrant and musically charged like he always has been.
Ian Anderson, without a shadow of a doubt, is still the man he’s always been, and surely still the artist he’s always been. That is what we have learned through listening and conversing in the year 2025.
Jethro Tull’s new album, Curious Ruminant, came out earlier this month, and on its release day of March 7, we got to speak to the mastermind via Zoom. Ian Anderson was in the midst of doing a slew of press, but he was ready to explain, unpack, and showcase his clear sense of self and this almost orchestral return-to-form, if you will, with The Aquarian once more.
The title track of Curious Ruminant didn’t come too long before the decision to name the album such, but it’s on-the-nose since Anderson dubs himself as a “curious” man, and says that he has been since he was a child. It carries him through life, just as it did this album. “That was the whole nature of it. I have always had curiosity in regard to many different subjects, different topics, different aspects of creativity. Every day I like to learn something – or several new things. Having acquired that new knowledge, I like to think it over. As we say in English, I like to chew the cud rather like a ruminant animal who chews vegetable matter and regurgitates it for a second helping. But, in the human sense, a ruminant is a contemplative person, and that’s me. I like to get new knowledge and then think about it, think it over, and try and put it into the context of my own life. Sometimes that will result in something more creative in terms of music and lyric writing, so when I came to do that particular track (which didn’t have a title), I went ahead and recorded it anyway, then I wrote all the lyrics and I thought, ‘What am I going to call this?’ My natural inclination was to go through the lyrics and try and find something in there that would be a good title, but the nature of what the song was about, rather than something in the lyrics, made me think of the title ‘Curious Ruminant.’ Then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll carry on with this thread of an idea and apply it to the songs on the album as a whole,’ so they’re all linked in a way as being more of an expression of my own personal thoughts, feelings, and viewpoints on subjects, rather than the more objective, stand-away approach that I more typically employed over the last 57 years of songwriting. This one is a bit more personal sounding, which is odd, perhaps, because it’s still a band album. With whatever it is, there are still six other guys on the record apart from me, but since they never read my lyrics, it doesn’t really matter what I write about.”
Funny enough, Ian Anderson originally admitted to The Aquarian in 1987 that he was “very, very selfish about making” Crest Of A Knave, the new Jethro Tull album at the time, and didn’t want any input from anyone else while writing and recording it – just Anderson totally in charge. It was a little bit of a departure from the more folksy, experimental sounds of their earlier work, too; definitely tighter, slightly heavier, and more balanced between instruments – evidently more equal parts of guitar and keyboards to add a smoother, almost R&B style to what he was doing. And by ‘he,’ we mean ‘he’ himself.
[L-R] Curious Ruminant album artwork; Ian Anderson / Photo by Ian Anderson
One of the newer well-balanced songs from Jethro Tull is “The Tipu House,” a cavernous yet melodic single from Curious Ruminant with a chorus that rings out like so: “All God’s children play in that toxic city garden, stealing from their brethren a saucy view or more, of domestic incidents and guilty copulation, the day of books and roses shown firmly to the door.” Anderson hopes the lyrics resonate in such a way that it reminds listeners of the beauty of personal, communal, and environmental enrichment, as well as the simple sights and sounds of everyday life.
“I wrote the lyrics to ‘Tipu House’ when I was actually on a short vacation in the sunny part of Italy, but it occurred to me after I wrote it that I think I had in my head more of a song that was set in India, but because there were so many Indian musical references in a song that I’d already recorded at that point, I felt that I would be better served by making it somewhere else, and I eventually decided to edit the lyrics and to make it set in Spain.”
He adds that he “had two other kinds of tree in mind for the title,” and not just the wide, foliage-filled Tipu. “I think I settled on the Tipu tree because it was native to the Mediterranean and grown as a tree for shelter in an urban situations where people might sit under the tree on a hot summer’s evening, and where children might be kicking a ball on a block in front of some graffiti-ridden apartment building. I had that picture in my head, and so ‘The Tipu House’ evolved out of that, and then I mention things in the song that are very much about Catalonian Spain and Saint’s Day, the day when lovers exchange gifts. The guy buys his lady some roses, and she buys him a book by tradition. I thought that was one of those little detail references that when you’re writing lyrics, even if you have a central subject, sometimes it’s the detail that lies just outside that central subject that gives it all the perspective and perhaps a bit more resonance.”
Anderson continues with a reflective tone, saying, “I suppose I do that when I’m writing lyrics, but I don’t overthink it and try too hard. These things just come naturally to me and I almost can’t help myself with some of that extraneous detail. Sometimes it’s useless and pointless and I have to edit it out again, but if it works, it works.”
That being said, it has to work for him before most anything else, because Jethro Tull might be a joint effort at large, but at its core, its the swirling melodic mind of Ian Anderson who rounds out the stories and styles we know the group well for. “It really takes quite a long time to develop those arrangements,” which is worthwhile most of the time, such as on his collaborative effort with The Carducci String Quartet, The String Quartets, but isn’t always necessary. “Some of [those] songs were an easy fit, yet some of the more rock-oriented songs had to be reconstructed. Each song on its own merits required a different approach,” he told us in 2017.
“I feel I have to put in elements of detail that are within the context of the album,” he shares now. “It gives everything a bit more clarity, a bit more reason for being, a bit more reason for study or analysis, so it’s the detail on the periphery, lyrically speaking and musically speaking, which gives me satisfaction that I don’t want to just keep within that central body in terms of subject material. I like to spin off, almost in a random way, and let thought processes move in a lateral direction. Occasionally just you fly off in a different direction, but even pop songwriters do that like Bob Dylan and John Lennon. You look at the lyrics and you can almost imagine them writing something, and then immediately that fires off something else. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with the main element of the song. I think it’s important for songwriters to do that, but first of all, to be singing for themselves primarily. You even get a hint of that with the partnerships like Lennon and [Paul] McCartney. There are songs that you just know are John Lennon’s lyrics, and, frankly, he doesn’t give a damn what Paul McCarney thinks. That’s the feeling I have about listening to some of his work and vice versa, where McCartney’s lyrics are very different coming from a different place, so I imagine the partnership and the spirit of that partnership was too important for one to not show approval of the other’s work, but they’re quite clearly different people doing things in a different way, I think that that’s kind of difficult in a writing partnerships, because I believe you have to be selfish and just go through it to the end on your own, and so if they did genuinely work together and in a more conspiratorial sense to come up with final lyrics or final tunes, then I have huge admiration for that ability, because I am incapable of working with anybody else. I’m just not a team player when it comes to writing music or lyrics. I am, however, a team player when it comes to working on the arrangements with the band and being together on stage. That is where I’m very much a team player. When it comes to that initial creative act, though, then I’m a lone wolf, and I don’t want to join a pack.”
Nevertheless, Anderson’s personalized attention to detail is far from useless or pointless. It is far from Beatle-esque, too, but it is his own, and it is one of the main reasons that Tull remains a peerless generation-spanning group. As well, it is because of those details and that effective, organic, and reflective storytelling from Anderson’s own mind that allows this record to close out with a lyric that definitely works: “To board the onward train, another journey.” It is a quintessential, truthful, and subtly metaphorical note to end on – something Anderson was keen on and took note of, as well.
“The final track is definitely one that I had in my mind that I wanted to end the record with as soon as I wrote it, and it was one of the last ones I did. As soon as I did it, I thought, ‘Yeah, this should be the closing of the album, because it’s a very downbeat and more of a spiritual song of comfort for the bereaved.’ When I’m talking about boarding another train and another journey, I’m talking about the Buddhist Samsara cycle of rebirth. Not that I’m a Buddhist any more than I’m a Christian or anything else, but its belief in the non-finality of death is something I find quite easy to absorb as a level of probability. I’m not certain, and I’m not a person of faith. I deal in possibilities and probabilities, but certainties imply faith, and faith is not something that I have. I’m perfectly content with looking at things in a more logical and scientific way to say, even if there is a good argument for something in the world in the case of spiritual and religious conventions.”
With that said, Anderson is a bold, broad thinker, and creative in his own way – whether it be with a pen in his hands or a flute at his lips. He knows how he works, though, and “certainly thinks about songs in terms of opening and closing albums, and the running order of the tracks based on their dynamics, the key, if they are in the time signature, and the feel of the song, too.” Curious Ruminant was no exception, and Anderson admits, “I go through lots of options coming up with the final running order of [an album], especially when you’re thinking about making a vinyl edition of that record, then it’s gotta make sense on vinyl. The two sides have got to be pretty much equal, and on this occasion, they’re almost exactly equal to the second, which is pure luck.”
The pacing, storyline, and flow of a front-to-back record, as the artist or band intended, with no skipping or shuffling necessary, brings joy to many classic music lovers, and this record delivers. However, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind it does not like spending a great deal of time on the art at hand. So, the ‘luck’ really was just that.
“Spending a lot of time is what I try not to do. I’m a fairly impulsive and quick writer that most of what I write lyrically or musically, I arrive at very quickly – within two or three hours. I mean, I really didn’t spend a lot of time at that point, because I wanted to have momentum and excitement for me as a writer, so I work very quickly, but I do then revisit it in the days following, and I apply a lot of editorial discipline, so I will change a word, an adjective, a noun, or a pronoun. I will change things to try to give a little bit more detail, a little bit more precision to it, but 95% of what I write in that first three hours is probably going to be on the finished record in the same way as when I press the button to record something. The first time I sing the song, I’m hoping I’m going to get 50% of something that is gonna be good, and I’ll keep it on the record, but I will mercilessly go back and delete any element that isn’t right and re-record it in a destructive way so that when I re-record it again, the previous part of the audio file is gone forever and it’s not recoverable. I don’t want to keep useless and redundant takes because I’m impulsive in the way that I work; just as a painter using oil paint, or, actually more pertinently, using watercolor, the marks you make on the painting cannot be covered up afterwards without blotting out what was there before. That in itself is destructive as an act – you paint over something and the previous thing is gone. I find that approach works for me as a songwriter perhaps because of my background in the more visual world of photography and painting.”
With a laugh, Anderson notes that his quote-unquote impulsive and selfish way of writing songs is just who he is through-and-through. “I just feel like writing lyrics is such a private act. I mean, I wouldn’t ask any of the members of the band to step into the shower with me, so why would I want to strip naked in front of them in the metaphorical sense of writing a song together? It’s a little bit too intimate in a scary way. I’m just not cut out for that – hence massages and saunas not being part of my world.”
Anderson on our cover, then and now.
In that same 1987 interview, Anderson said he “tend[s] to believe these days that you must be ruthlessly selfish as a musician and that you have to do what you yourself are motivated by and sod everyone else. It doesn’t matter a lot what anybody else thinks about it. If I enjoy what I’m doing, there’s more chance of that coming across to an audience and them enjoying it, too. But if I get up on stage and try to be a true-blue showbizzer and grit my teeth and perform my way through the songs, that is not gonna convince anyone.”
In 2025, Anderson follows that same methodology no matter how selfish… or how vulnerable. “I’ve always believed that the best way to communicate something to an audience is to be honest and not try to second guess what their preference is or what their expectation is,” he explains on the topic of music being self-indulgent first and foremost, adding that part of what makes it hard to work with other people is their affinity for the business over the artistic integrity and personal expression.
“Do what you feel is right, and if it’s done with honesty and a genuine sense of commitment, then there’s more chance people are going to recognize that as real and substantive, rather than it being contrived for their enjoyment. So often that’s the case with particularly record producers; they will scientifically almost arrive at a version of a song that is based on algorithms in their mind of what is going to sell the most copies. I don’t like to do it like that. A couple of times I’ve gone a little bit down that direction and rather regretted it because I felt that I’d attempted to write something commercial. I don’t think it pays off in my case, because I don’t think it has a sincerity of the things of which I prefer, which I do without any anticipation of other people liking it – members of the band and the audience alike. I do it for me. I’m working for my own satisfaction and enjoyment primarily, and if the guys in the band like it, that’s great. If an audience likes it, that’s even better. First of all, though, it’s got to appeal to me in very isolated and private terms. It’s important to for me to enjoy the process of writing and recording, and to listen to something back and say, ‘Wow, I really like that. That’s great.’ That is what matters to me. I only think about other people as an afterthought, really. It’s a very selfish way of working, but it’s the way I think it’s the most honest way of working.”
As stated earlier, Anderson currently credits the great painters and sculptors of Europe and beyond for further inspiring this intimate understanding of creating something, anything, that has meaning. Or, perhaps, a different meaning under different interpersonal contexts.
“It may be an analogy that doesn’t make sense to everyone, but being from the painterly arts, I can’t imagine [Claude] Monet or [Édouard] Manet or Suzanne [Valadon] working on a new canvas and actually thinking, ‘Oh, I’m doing this because people are going to like it.’ They were so engrossed in what they’re doing. [Ludwig van] Beethoven, [Johann Sebastian] Bach, [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart – they were people doing this for the sheer joy and thrill, the enthusiasm of working in their medium without expectation of success. There are times when many classical composers have done something as a commission, and they’re actually having to write something that does work for their patron or for the public. Sometimes that’s what they had to do. Same thing with the great sculptures – mostly it was commissioned work by the Catholic Church in the case of Michelangelo and others. They were having to provide something that was going to be commercially successful in the sense that it would be meeting with the approval of the of the church hierarchy at a certain point in time. When I was recently in Florence and saw some original work by Michelangelo and other painters and sculptors, I found myself wondering, ‘How would they have dealt with that subject of if they hadn’t had the commission to do it?’ I mean, even to acquire the marble to start with would’ve been beyond their financial resources if they weren’t getting paid a lot of money for it, so I often wonder about what would they have done if they’d been free of any commercial restraint. It might it have been just the same, or would it be better, or would it be worse? Would we know the difference? That is the point of the question: would we know the difference? I think that in my case, you would know the difference if I was trying to write and record music that was designed to be approved of by other people. You would notice the difference, which is why I tend not to do it.”
Anderson might not even be wholly aware of what is commercial viable in the year at hand, which is part of the beauty of Curious Ruminant and the process of the record, as well as the records that came before it. Back in 1989 the frontman told us that he doesn’t listen to music recreationally, because it often wasn’t very original or exciting or “new.” That is still the case for him, and given that Jethro Tull is ever the cult favorite, Anderson must be doing something right with that approach, even if he told us 48 years ago that it took some time to reach their then-beloved status. (In 1977, on the topic of becoming a musician, wanting a guitar, and defying parents and social expectations, Anderson told us, “There’s a great amount of luck involved and a lesser amount of talent than other people might think you’d have to possess. There’s no substitute for a certain amount of luck if you want to play ‘Chemin de fer’ with the rock’n’roll stakes… if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you can be the greatest thing since sliced bread and you’ll [fall] by the wayside, and we nearly did several times.”)
We must add that Jethro Tull is still belove, and has not fallen by the rock-and-roll wayside just yet in their almost six-decade career, even if Anderson hasn’t spun a new album outside of his own in more than four of those decades.
“I should be very thankful for the many musicians who inspired me when I was 16/17 years old, and from the mid fifties, I suppose, through the mid sixties. That was a time of huge influence that I absorbed as a teenager and incorporated into the earliest music that I began to write and record. Mainly, of course, they were Black American musicians and either making blues or jazz music. That was hugely influential to me. Some of that influence came from other musicians through o the early part of the 1970s, at which point I decided, ‘You know what? I think I’ve heard enough. It’s time to stop listening to music with a view to acquiring new musical influence.’ I felt I had plenty to work with at that point, and so not since the mid-seventies could you call me a music aficionado. I’m not a great listener to music, and if I do listen to music these days, it’s just purely to reduce the stress of flying or traveling. When I listen to music, usually it’s Bach or Renaissance or classical music that I find restful – not inspiring in the sense of musicality, but inspiring intellectually and emotionally, and some spiritually, too. I listen to quite a lot of choral music that is really written for, or in connection with, Christian worship. However, that doesn’t make me a Christian – it just makes me a person who is seduced by the serenity and the spiritual essence of certain kinds of music. A lot of church music I find very satisfying without necessarily getting into the detail of the lyrics, which are very often in Latin anyway, and it’s been a long time since I briefly studied Latin as a schoolboy,” Anderson summarizes with a laugh.
JETHRO TULL’S NEW ALBUM IS OUT NOW WHEREVER YOU LISTEN TO/PURCHASE MUSIC!
