Description

Formed in 1968, Jethro Tull are one of rock’s most enduring bands. Their 1971 album Aqualung, with its provocative lyrical content and continuous musical shifts, is widely considered to be one of the most influential records in the progressive rock canon. It’s also an album that can handle many different interpretations. Allan Moore, Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, tackles the album on track-by-track basis, picking apart lan Anderson’s lyrics and studying the complex structures and arrangements of these memorable songs. 33 1/3 is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist’s entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives, often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task that can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors – musicians, scholars, and writers – are deeply in love with the album they have chosen. Previous titles in this now well-established series have beaten sales expectations and received excellent review coverage – the third batch is sure to continue this success. More titles follow in the spring of 2005.