A Christmas Song –
Wond’ring Again –
Christmas is quickly approaching, with only one more week to go! So to help get y’all in the holiday spirit I decided to grab a Christmas tune from my library. Hope you enjoy!
Living In The Past (1972), by Jethro Tull. It’s been about one year since last featuring one of Jethro Tull’s albums on LP Mondays. At the time I described them as “the band that had the biggest impact upon me last year,” and a year later I still easily list them as one my all-time favorites. They’re also quickly becoming one my Christmas traditions with their excellent The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, which features arrangements of classical Christmas melodies along with a large selection of original Christmas and winter-related tunes they wrote over their career. But today I’m talking about a different Jethro Tull album.
The compilation album Living In The Past consists of a few unreleased songs, but is primarily a collection of their early singles. Several of the songs on the album were remixed slightly and were reworked in stereo, only ever having a mono release prior to the album. Along with all of the singles and early cuts, the third side contains two songs from their live performance at Carnegie Hall in 1970. The album itself is packaged more like a large hardcover book that opens up as a booklet with over 50 featured photos of the band. The second and second last pages are actually record sleeves that hold the two LPs. As you can tell from the photo, the gold lettering on the front cover of mine has faded with the years. Later reissues would use different packaging materials, change the back to list the tracks, and would also change the colors to a more reddish maroon and yellowish gold for an overall brighter color scheme.
Enough talk about packaging though, what about the songs? The first one is bluntly titled “A Christmas Song” and was originally released as the B-side of their third single “Love Story” in 1968 (but was also included on a few B-sides of their next single “Living in the Past”). The song features the usual sarcasm and humor that several of Ian Anderson’s lyrics tend to carry with them. As a whole, the song warns against the “thoughtless pleasures” that comes with the holiday festivities and our tendency to forget what the holiday originally was meant to celebrate. He poses the question: How we can feast when there are others in the world suffering? Eventually the speaker concludes that this is “just a Christmas Song” and decides to join in with the celebration. Side note, the song would amusingly get a sequel more than 20 years later titled “Another Christmas Song”.
The next song is a little different than most others on the album. “Wond’ring Again” is actually a very early cut of the tune “Wond’ring Aloud” which made an appearance on their famous album Aqualung. The original version addresses the fact that we are using up the Earth’s natural resources and contemplates the future that our children will be left with. The first two verses discuss this through satire while pointing out that the poor and weak are the first subjected to our mistakes. The third and final verse changes focus from the illustrated satire to a first-person interaction that acts as symbolism against the rest of the song.
The Aqualung version is less than half the length of the original cut, consists of almost entirely new lyrics, and is stripped down to only a simple acoustic guitar, piano, and an added string part. As for the lyrics, the original is often seen as being more pessimistic when compared to the romantic lyrics of the second version. There is no publicly known reason the song was changed for the album and there are many fan theories behind the alterations made to the piece. Some argue that the second version could be interpreted as a love song written to Anderson’s newly married wife, while others point out the fact that the original cut was the final song their ex-bass player contributed to. Another popular belief is that it was too heavy of a subject matter and did not nicely fit in with the already complicated themes of god and religion that Aqualung dealt with. I think these are all contributing factors, but would probably give more credit to the idea that it did not fit smoothly on the album. Several of the songs on Aqualung tend to be long, serious (or at least sarcastically serious), and occasionally grave in tone, but they are offset with short roughly one-minute tracks that are almost the complete opposite. Some of these songs are happy, some sad, some just silly, but they offer the listener a short break from the complicated themes of the album and provide a delightful bridge to the following song.
I’m honestly torn between which version I prefer, but I do believe that “Wond’ring Aloud” is the best fit for its place on the Aqualung album. However, “Wond’ring Again” has its third verse, which is just so…perfect! If you’re looking for the best of both worlds though, a few years ago they officially released an amazing mash-up titled “Wond’ring Aloud, Again”. Jethro Tull’s wacky antics and silly sense of humor isn’t for everyone, but Ian Anderson really does have a knack for poetry and the courage to tackle deep, compelling topics. They may be rather eclectic in their tastes and influences, but their music ends up ironically becoming very niche in nature.
