In 1972 the famous rock group Jethro Tull released "Thick As A Brick", an album that consisted of a single composition that exceeded 40 minutes in length. With complex music, exceptional instrumentation, and intelligent lyrics, the album reached the number one spot on Billboard 200 for a time and instantly became a progressive rock classic.
Now, 40 years later, Jethro Tull's legendary frontman Ian Anderson is writing a follow up to the prog rock masterpiece.
The new album, entitled "Thick As A Brick 2 - Whatever Happened To Gerald Bostock?", is set for release on April 2, 2012. As the name implies, the music will explore the life of Gerald Bostock, the fictional eight-year-old child who supposedly penned the lyrics to "Thick As A Brick".
Ian Anderson spoke about the concept of the new record in a bit more depth on J-Tull.com.
"The theme of this anniversary 'part two' album is to examine the possible different paths that the precocious young schoolboy, Gerald Bostock, might have taken later in life and to create alter-ego characters whose song-section identities illustrate the hugely varied potential twists and turns of fate and opportunity," Anderson explained. "Not just for Gerald but to echo how our own lives develop, change direction and ultimately conclude through chance encounters and interventions, however tiny and insignificant they might seem at the time."
"In the development of the piece, the divergences of life’s infinitely forked roads finally give way to an almost gravitational pull which results in convergence to, perhaps, a pre-ordained, karma-like conclusion."
Although the original album was released by Jethro Tull as a band, the sequel will fall under Ian Anderson's name and as such will not feature longtime Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre.
Check out the official trailer below for some more information about the upcoming release and to hear snippets of some promising new material.
So they're making a sequel to my favorite album/song of all time, interesting. Normally I'd be sceptical but I've also never encountered a Tull/Anderson song I've disliked so this should be good, even if it doesn't quite live up to it's predecessor.
TAAB is quite literally one of my all-time favourite albums. It is about as perfect an album as you will ever find, and rightly regarded as one of the all time great Prog albums.
Knowing that Anderson is working on a sequel... I'm incredibly nervous, but also everso faintly hopeful. Anderson is an incredibly intelligent musician, and from that interview snippet it sounds like he's giveing TAAB 2 the depth it needs. Here's to hoping the music is up to scratch.
Also, I would absolutely love it if he released it as another newspaper album, and all the Radiohead fanboys accused him of copying their beloved band...
We've detected that you are using Ad Blocking software.
If you hate ads, but love Ultimate Guitar, how about subscribing to Ultimate Guitar's Ad Free Service? If you subscribe to this service, you won't see annoying banner ads, pop-up ads, text-link ads or video ads and will be helping to support your favorite site at the same time.
As you know, we provide you with a lot of great, free content like news, reviews, interviews, tabs and chords, but you see, ads are the way we generate revenue to run UG and pay royalties to the songwriters and music publishers of the songs that are posted here.
