Move On Alone - Jethro Tull
3:23
This Was, 1968
Written by Ian Anderson
Mick Abrahams, the original guitarist of Jethro Tull, died yesterday. In honor of his passing, I'm turning to a side of Tull I've long neglected — their debut album, and this song, the only track not sung by Ian Anderson in the Tull catalog. It offers a glimpse of an alternate Tull, one in which Abrahams's voice and influence might have shaped a different Tull. This song is stately, more soft-rock than folk-blues, much gentler than the harder rock direction they went in that improbably won them Best Heavy Metal album in 1989. Lyrically it sticks to reliable blues tropes: his baby done left him, nothing makes him happy: "I feel so sad now that she's gone / I've been loving that woman too long / There's no place to go because my friends have all moved / Got nothing but sit in the sun." The music, however, sidesteps the hard blues sound of the rest of the album, and even ventures into a sprightly British dance-hall coda. In the wake of Abrahams' death it feels like a quiet, fitting reminder of what he brought to the band, and what Tull briefly was before moving on without him.
No comments:
Post a Comment