Jethro Tull‘s relationship with the Christmas season goes all the way back to the legendary band’s early days. Now it’s to be renewed for modern-day admirers and longtime fans alike, with the release of an expanded and remixed edition of 2003’s The Jethro Tull Christmas Album via InsideOutMusic on the 6th December 2024.
Under the title The Jethro Tull Christmas Album – Fresh Snow At Christmas, the bands 21st studio album has been remixed from the original masters by Bruce Soord (The Pineapple Thief), as well as being given the surround sound treatment in both Dolby Atmos & 5.1. The limited deluxe 4CD + Blu-ray book-set collection features all-new artwork, as well as live material, and includes the following across its 5 discs.
CD1 features original album mixes, CD2 Bruce Soord remixes, CD3 features Christmas Live At St. Bride’s 2008, newly remixed by Bruce Soord, and CD4 features The Ian Anderson Band previously unreleased and live At St. Bride’s in 2006. The Blu-ray features Dolby Atmos, 5.1 Surround Sound and high resolution stereo mixes of The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, as well as both live recordings
In addition to this, the album will be released on vinyl for the very first time, as a gatefold 180g 2LP featuring the 2024 remixes, and available from here.
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album was much praised on its first release, with Rolling Stone magazine noting admiringly: “The originals simmer with eccentric, eclectic, folky energy, rocking ditties threaded through with Celtic stylings, jazzy undercurrents, Ian Anderson’s distinctive flute and wry humour.” Allmusic called it “perhaps the most satisfying Tull releases in 25 years.”
It included new interpretations of no fewer than seven Tull songs, including their first to be inspired by the holiday, 1968’s much-loved ‘A Christmas Song. That Anderson composition, which opened with lyrics interpolated from ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, was the B-side of the band’s first UK chart single, ‘Love Story’.
“Some of the tracks are not necessarily Christmas songs; they’re more seasonal so that gives a broader window,” Anderson remarked. “And then there are a couple of them that I quite often play in the middle of summer and say, ‘It’ll soon be Christmas – it’s in the diary. So, let’s kick it off now.’ And that’s part of what I’ve done over the years since October of 1968 when I went into record ‘A Christmas Song’. ‘So, yes – it goes back a long way.”
‘A Christmas Song’was joined on the album by reworkings of such pieces as Tull‘s 1976 festive hit ‘Ring Out Solstice Bells’; ‘Weathercock’, first heard on 1978’s Heavy Horses; and ‘Another Christmas Song’, from 1989’s Rock Island. Also, among the rerecordings was J.S. Bach’s ‘Bourrée’, another longtime live favourite, inimitably imagined by Anderson.
“Part of the joy of redoing those things,” he said, “is that you can… not necessarily recreate, but you can keep all the essential elements of the song and maybe declutter it a little bit and give it a fresh look, but essentially still staying faithful to the original arrangements.”
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album was the last studio set to feature longtime guitarist Martin Barre, who composed its pretty closing instrumental ‘A Winter Snowscape’. Also featured on the album were keyboard and accordion player Andrew Giddings, bassist Jonathan Noyce and drummers Doane Perry and James Duncan. Anderson compositions making their debut included the opening ‘Birthday Card At Christmas’ and ‘First Snow On Brooklyn’, while traditional pieces such as ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ and ‘We Five Kings’ were interpreted alongside Fauré’s ‘Pavane‘.
