Ian Anderson revisits Jethro Tull album

(CBS News) Jethro Tull singer and flautist Ian Anderson says he never had a nostalgic urge to record sequels to some of the band's past works, especially the classic 1972 progressive rock record "Thick as a Brick." As he says before when asked if that had been on his mind: "It's been very much on my mind for a period of 39 years that I would no sooner go back and revisit "Thick as a Brick," than I would dig my own grave and jump in it, because it just wasn't something that seemed like a place I wanted to go."

The original album's concept revolves around 8-year-old Gerald Bostock, whose storywas featured in the local British newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle. Gerald  was banned from a poetry contest because he said an obscenity on the BBC. Bostock's poem, "Thick as a Brick," would later serve as the lyrics for Jethro Tull's record of the same name. (In reality, however, Gerald Bostock and The St. Cleve Chronicle were fake).

Forty years later, the British musician revisits "Thick as a Brick" with a follow-up titled "TAAB2" (or "Thick as a Brick 2"). Anderson tells CBSNews.com that he changed his mind about doing the sequel after talking with Derek Shulman, the former singer of the '70s British progressive rock band Gentle Giant and now a record industry exec.

"I was asked the question, 'Whatever happened to Gerald Bostock?'" he says. "'What would he be doing today, what would have happened to the St. Cleve Chronicle, the newspaper that formed the packaging of the original album?' Those two questions set my mind moving over the next few weeks in terms in giving me the bones of a concept album for 2012."

In addition to the release of "TAAB2" last month, Anderson and his band are currently on the road performing both the sequel and the original "Thick as a Brick" album in their entirety. The most noticeable aspect of "TAAB2" is that it was recorded and released as an Ian Anderson solo album rather than a Jethro Tull one - it doesn't feature Tull's longtime guitarist Martin Barre. Anderson explains that it was mutually agreed that he and Barre would work on separate projects.

"I'm like a football team manager," he says. "I had to pick the right people. I really felt that the guitar player that I've been working with in the last ten years at the Ian Anderson shows - which outnumbers the Jethro Tull shows in the last few years - not just he, but the other musicians, too, were the people I felt I wanted to work on this album."

Making "TAAB2" a solo release was an opportunity for Anderson to tour without the expectations that accompany Jethro Tull from the audience. "If I go out as 'Ian Anderson' ... it gives me a bit more feeling that I could broaden the repertoire," he says. "In short, the beer-drinking buddies are more likely to stay at home when it just says 'Ian Anderson' on the ticket, and they won't come interrupt me and the rest of the audience by whistling and shouting."

On the new album, longtime fans will recognize familiar musical elements from the first "Thick as a Brick" record, which is essentially one long song split in two parts to fit each side of the original vinyl release. Anderson credits the use of the same type of instruments and manner of recording on "TAAB2" as the link to the first album. As for the lyrics, he drew on several possible different scenarios of Gerald Bostock's life in the last 40 years such as a homeless person, a banker, an evangelist and a soldier.

"The elements where we look at the differences in today's world compared to 40 years ago," says Anderson. "Homelessness in 2012 is a different homelessness to how it was... I kind of wanted to look at that because the song "Aqualung" is about a homeless person in 1971. We're about a year away from the draw-down in Afghanistan of U.S. troops and I can't help but remember 40 years ago and we were a year away from the exit of Vietnam and very possibly with the same outcome."

For "TAAB2"'s album cover, in which the fake newspaper The St. Cleve Chronicle is now a Web site, Bostock has grown up to be a former politician who has moved to St. Cleve. "That was the most obvious one from the word go," Anderson says of making Gerald a politician. "I could only concentrate on a handful literally of possibilities on each of those topics to have two broad chunks of music, one that might be the link piece to getting from childhood to adulthood, and the other piece that would be looking at that character in the context of today. Politician was the most obvious one but I decided to keep it for the album cover rather than to go there in song."

The original "Thick as a Brick " by Jethro Tull is a classic record from the British progressive rock era consisting of a mixture of rock and folk elements. It was Anderson's answer to people's opinion of Jethro Tull's 1971's "Aqualung" as a concept record.

"It had three or four songs that were loosely connected, but that doesn't make it a concept album," Anderson says today. "It was with just a sense of impish humor that I then started to write 'Thick as a Brick.' It was extraordinary that [the rest of the guys in the band] went along with without questioning really it. They couldn't have known where we were headed because we would go in and rehearse some new music every morning. And I only had written it a couple of hours before. We added to the album every day with what I was writing.

"At that time, we were all working to the limits of our musical and technical ability, pushing the boundaries for ourselves as individuals as well as collectively as a band. It was a corporate effort, but conceptually speaking, it was my baby. It had no other parents."

Anderson and his band will tour the States to perform both "Thick as a Brick" and "TAAB2" starting in September. "It's not particularly difficult to play in terms of the standards of [what] we're working with right now," explains Anderson. "It's tricky for sure, but it's all well within our musical abilities to play that stuff. It's the mental focus on remembering two hours' worth of music between the two albums, which is pretty intense full on because you don't get nice convenient little breaks where you can sit and gather your resources, tune up, sort yourself out and think what's coming next.

"The new one is relatively easy for me to do, to do exactly what I did on the record, note for note exactly the same and for the other guys, too, because they played it live in the studio that way. It has very much more of a feeling bit of being live and indeed playable live of course it's a studio album with all the benefits of a controlled studio environment. "

As for Gerald Bostock, who has become an indelible part of Jethro Tull's history, Anderson admits that people still think that Gerald is real. "If you visit Gerald Bostock's Facebook site," he says earlier in the interview, "there are people who are talking as if Gerald Bostock was a real person. I'm sure most of them know that they are really talking to me, but that's part of the fun of it. We buy into Peter Pan and Father Christmas and 'Star Wars'...we love to buy into the improbable. We kind of know it's pretending, but sometimes pretending is good for us."