Yeah you know what you’re talking about and most likely never even listened to the album. Since your the only naysayer among all these reviews , clearly your not a Tull follower so why be here. If you think Tull is trash would love hear what you think is good………….
Tull was all over the place stylistically - intense metal riffage with biting social commentary, jazzed up classical melodies, sentimental folky love songs, catchy pop, synthy techno pop , complex prog with convoluted lyrics. You might like one album or song and hate another. Part of the reason many of us think this is the "best" is because it's so different - not just from them, but from most anything else out there. Tull could rock with the best of them, but they weren't obsessed with just being "rock'n'roll" or fitting into a scene - they were in their own artistic world.
A great album for sure, but not necessarily better than was Heavy Horses, Warchild, Bursting Out, Thick As A Brick Aqualung Benefit, Passion Play,Minstrel etc.but I am just a biased fan.
A very special record for me. I first encountered it sometime in the late 80s when I was a teenager, living in this miserable suburban sprawl of tract houses, treeless streets, mud flowing into the street every time it rained from the disturbed earth of new construction. I ran a BBS at the time; my bedroom was an alienated cave of computers, Pink Floyd/Gerald Scarfe posters, and records. I wanted to be anywhere else but what I was. I couldn't stand the decade, or the place. Songs from the Wood is Somewhere Else. I remember longing, aching, for forests. Anything but the endless hammering, destruction of meadows, and general miserableness around me. I have never been able to reconcile the rational me which knows modernity, with its pharmaceuticals, information technology (hello Internet), and advanced heating and cooling systems makes for a much more comfortable existence, and the larger part of me which despises it all. This album fell right into that contradiction. On at least one occasion, some years later, I remember sitting in my high school cafeteria, imagining a particularly loathsome bully burning in a giant wicker man. I've never even been to the UK.
The Prettiest Tull album is a great description, the easiest listening album from Tull with much melody. Classic album, all Tull albums up to Broadsword are great albums in their own unique way.
The real stunner was that it came out after "Too Old to Rock and Roll: Too Young to Die!", one of their worst. A total switch recalling Pentangle or Fairport Convention, but with a lot more amperage.
Interesting how songs can transport you to a place or a time in history. Native Texan here but SFTW makes me feel like I’m in Nottingham Forest! Brilliant album that never grows old. “Pirates” by ELP has the same effect on me. Thanks for sharing!
I had begun to think Ian was hitting the doldrums when this came out. It is my favorite from him without a doubt. It is so positive and uplifting, while remaining so tongue in cheek, it’s his pinnacle. The band was absolutely on fire here and the best tour(s) were during this period.
Agreed. My college friends and I were SO disappointed by Too Old that SFTW came as a total and welcome surprise. Gained several new Tull fans among our group as well.
Songs from the Wood is one of my favorite albums. To me the three rustic albums represent the seasons. Songs From The Wood is spring/summer, Heavy Horses is autumn and Stormwatch is winter.
It's my fav Tull album. It came out junior year in high school. It was popular with my crowd. We even had a party spot in the woods we called "Velvet Green" it looked very much like the album cover.
Great review! SFTW is my favorite Tull album, but it seemed that I was alone in my appreciation for it when I was a teenager/young adult back in '80s. I'm gratified to see so much love for this record.
Im so pleased to hear someone else say this. It’s been one of my favourite all time albums and Tull’s absolute best offering. I literally wore out my first LP copy. To be honest I still listen with headphones and pick up little things. It’s a masterpiece at every level. I played drums when I was younger and as a result of this album Barriemore Barlow became my biggest influence. Thanks for featuring it.
An absolutely superb album an album that takes me back to happier times when I hadn't experienced losing my parents or my marriage falling apart , this album along with Heavy Horses I would take on my Desert island discs if I ever got famous enough to be invited on.
JT is one of my favorite bands, and this album one of my favorite album they made. And your text is a wonderful tribute to it. Greetings for your words and your style!
I loved this album, especially after the disappointing “Too Old”. However, I would place “Stand Up”, “Benefit”, “Thick as a Brick”, and “A Passion Play” higher, and possibly “Aqualung”, “Minstrel in the Gallery”, and “Stormwatch” too. But I guess that shows how incredible Tull’s catalog was up to that point. They were on fire.
Agree 💯 all things Jethro Tull comes together right here. Brilliant folk prog album. One of the finest in that genre. February 1977. Music lesson, the teacher, elder lady, had just bought this brand new Jethro Tull album. She played the whole album without interruption. We kids listened, me and my music buddy went stunned. The best music lesson we ever had. It was astonishing how great taste of music this woman in her forties had. What a treat.
Not just one of my favorite Tull albums, but one of my all-time favorite albums, period. As you said, the tones between Songs and Heavy Horses are different, but I still look upon both together as comprising a double album..... much in the same way as Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering being a double album.
I became a Tull fan right after the release of TOTRR, so SFTW was the first new Tull release I purchased. It would inform my musical tastes for the next 40+ years and get me to explore American and British Isles folk and folk-rock and all the various offshoots of each. But SFTW is brilliant in its own right musically and lyrically for all of the reasons Barry mentioned and more. It's hardly twee or mawkish if you bothered to pay attention. For my money, SFTW was Tull at its collective zenith. They were never this great before or after in the studio, though the follow-up comes damn close for me. What a thrilling listen this still is.
Very well researched, spoken and illustrated, sir. Pibroch is absolutely haunting, from Martin’s guitar to the switch from third person to first person, from “a light in the house” to “turn my head and walk away.”
Songs From the Wood is my personal all-time favorite Tull Album. Still looking forward to the Steven Wilson remix of : Under Wraps:. Thanks for sharing this treasure piece of music. Cheers from Indiana. 👍
Interesting that this came out in the eye of the punk storm. Everyone involved here was at the top of their game. Still sounds fresh. BTW I heard Adrian Edmondson playing with Tull and he claimed that Aqualung was 😂 Rotten's favorite album.
I was heavily into hard rock (while always a Tull fan) and this album was a breath of fresh air for me (no pun inteded). I was just listening to it this morning. Moths is such a lovely song.
It came out when I was in high school and is indeed my favorite Tull album. It’s the perfect Autumn album. The drummer in my first working band used to say it was like Robin Hood and his merry men got ahold of some electric instruments and went running amok through the forest.
Prog Rock in general and Tull in particular had a strong conservative element as so did the hippy movement in many ways. It was mostly about going back to more traditional and spiritual times in search of some long-lost golden and spiritual age when things when perhaps not meaningless and materialistic shit as they are today. Being young at the time and therefore armed with a degree and filled with a degree of nieve optimism only young people can possess we looked at this with a degree of suspicion. We liked it all the same as this mystical stuff went down well with a few smokes. Now we have grown we hopefully understand what these guys were really saying as we have now heard the promise of Jam Tomorrow and witnessed the Pigs eat all of it. Worse still leaving us with little but debt and empty lives. Therefore we start to ask ourselves, was it really so bad a thousand years ago? Maybe life was better, or at least people were happier. We can see the material gains, but at what cost? Our indoctrination system managed to convince us that however crap our present may seem the past was many times worse and our future would be so much better if we only did what we were told to do and embrace the future. 60-80 years later and we find that we have been effectively stuck in a time. Some material aspects have improved but all of the most important things have got progressively worse. So bad is the future now looking, that many young people will never bring children into the world, and it really does not get more existential than that.
I resisted getting on board the Tull train for years. I couldn't get past the Renaissance fair attendees playing folk music in Sherwood Forest stereotype (which the cover of 'SFTW' reinforced). I kept hearing about how Prog they were but the songs I heard on the radio (Aqualung, Bungle In The Jungle, etc.) didn't do much to sell me. Then after I dove into 'Thick As A Brick' and 'A Passion Play' I finally "got" it. Now I'm able to appreciate works like 'SFTW' and how it's more connected to the Medieval English folklore of say early Genesis and Zep's 'Battle Of Evermore' than Greenwich Village of the 60s. A sign of a great album is that no one else but that particular band could have made that album and 'SFTW' could only have been made by Jethro Tull!
Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses were the albums that introduced me to the Tull catalog. To this day, the songs on these two records hold a special place in my heart. I have a fond memory of hiking up a mountain with a friend and the two of us singing out the accapella intro to Songs from the Wood at the top of our teenaged lungs. Thank you for this excellent review of one of the most important recordings of my lifetime.
Jethro Tull from 1977-1979 is my favorite era. The 3 albums they made during that time are pure magic. I like most of their albums, but those 3 are extra special to me.
This is one of the JT albums I regularly revisit being drawn to the folklore element. I can also recommend the book mentioned in the video. 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain'. Great reference source and a fascinating and sometimes scary read.
At one time I had a cassette tape with Songs from the Wood on one side and Genesis' Nursery Crime on the other. I listened to that tape endlessly. Those were the days...
Stunning stuff. If he’d come out with a stinker it wouldn’t have surprised anyone. Suddenly there’s this magical and unique album which could not have been done by anyone else. Some of the arrangements are just mouth watering
This is probably my all-time favorite Jethro Tull album, although I go back and forth whether this is or Thick As A Brick is my favorite Tull album. In any case, I love this album.
Velvet Green is my favourite one of this fabulous album and I always get an Elizabethan theme going on in it and the start of the 3 folk rock releases...Best line up in my view... It's in my top 3 of Tull albums....It lies third after Minstrel In The Gallery and Thick as a Brick....
Very timely video. Plans for 200 houses (on green belt land) have been chucked through my letterbox. I live opposite the land and beyond them is the New Forest
For me, this is the quintessential Tull album. The first (and best) of the ‘folk trilogy’, with the classic line-up of band members and full of tunes even your girlfriend will enjoy.
An incredibly interesting review of this album. I look forward to hearing your reviews on other albums. Exceptional! I will immediately subscribe to your RU-vid channel!
@@harrynewiss4630 Music is such a personal thing and what works for some doesn't for others. For me, Benefit is a time capsule. Benefit is 1970, it sounds like 1970 and it feels like 1970. "Inside" is my favorite Tull song. "For Michael Collins, Jeffery and me", "With You There to Help Me", "Teacher", good songs. I really like the album, it's my fav. Song's From the Wood is a great album as well.
i have found individual jethro tull songs i like but i've sidestepped them to my own detriment i guess. you're just the person to talk me into getting past that mental block.
What a tremendous rebound, it is fantastic top to bottom. Too Old to RnR is pretty uninspired IMO, I don't listen to it much, but I listen to SftW - and pretty much all their 70-80s work - all the time. Thanks for the review.
I was 13 when "Too Old "came out. I bought it after seeing the TV-special...it is not the masterfully " Songs From The Wood"...but there are some great riffs from Martin ( Quizz Kid and Taxi Grab for instance) , while Salamander is a rousing folky upbeat song! "Too Old"is The ugly Duckling by many fans. I disagree. It deserves better. All in all... my top 3: Aqualung; Thick As A Brick ; Songs FTW. In any order. 🙂
@@mclarsj I don't think it's terrible, I like a lot of the album, I just think the title track and longer songs like 'checkered flag' tend to drag a bit. I think Ian's 'social fly-on-the-wall' phase had played out and he needed a re-set, and SFtW was so perfect that it makes some of the previous material feel lumpy. Still better than what a lot of bands were up to at the time.
I appreciate the discussion of "Too Old." I always dug it, and still do. To me, every song is happening, from beginning to end. Direct blues influence is evident in Martin's gritty slide and the raw harmonica on "Taxi Grab," and in the acoustic guitar language of "Bad Eyed And Loveless", as well as elsewhere. I hear a lot of Tull listeners dismiss it as somehow inferior - I disagree. I'm afraid people give it short shrift, never listening enough to recognize how very great of a record it is.
@@carlmassengale1027 I think it is a good album, but was not quite as inspiring for me. Might just be the age I got into Tull, for some reason when I heard Too Old it didn't connect with me like the others had. I didn't hear them when they came out, i was a few years too young. So I could see how 'Too Old' fits well with some fans, It has good lyrics, i like a lot of the songs, i think for some reason i just don't like the title track, and that could really just be about me. But, if i hadn't heard a lot of other fans feeling the same way, I'd agree. It is about me, and, about the album. Nothing is perfect, all of their albums have highs and lows. If people like it, then I cheer them listening to it. Whatever gets people listening to more Jethro Tull.
Great review as always.This album is very acoustic and bucolic in tone, which is when I think I like Andersons' work best. His lyrics are some of his finest too in my opinion and compliment the music perfectly. Velvet Green is definitely a highlight for me.
I love this album but also have a strong leaning towards Broadsword and the Beast probably as I bought it when it came out and played it to death on my Tandy Walkman copy. All Tull albums have a place in my heart and soul.
I'll admit that I was never a huge Tull fan growing up, so on its release this album, while ubiquitous on radio and hummed by schoolmates, pretty much passed me by for years. When I tried to catch up after so much anticipation I was underwhelmed. To me, it feels like the equivalent of Morris dancing, loaded with fol-de-rol. I even got the Steve Wilson remix to really give it another try, but it just hasn't landed. It feels...quaint.
A perfect album, folky but not folky, Pagan but not Pagan - it’s quintessentially English, steeped in lore and customs, beautifully played with silky smooth vocals that whisper beautiful melodies to an unfolding story. I wish the quality of the recording was a bit better, it lacks a little depth, compared to Minstrel in the Gallery for example but otherwise I find myself reverting to this album more often than I should. A masterpiece out of a line of brilliant material over the years from Jethro Tull.
Definitely my favourite Tull album. The title track is a great start to the album and many great songs follow. I love Velvet Green. Those 3 very different verses that follow the opening 2 verses are masterful. Ther are some really good RU-vid videos of live versions of many of the songs and demonstrate what a really talented band they were. Great review.
In my opinion "Songs from the Wood" and "Heavy Horses" are the two faces of a golden medal , and what a fantastic line-up ! "Live Bursting out "is a perfect evidence of their great talent.
Thank you! SFTW is one of my favourite albums of all time. It captures, for me anyway, the spirit of English Paganism and folklore better than other mainstream album. It is the audio equivalent of 'Blood on Satan's Claw'.
Try the cultband Comus : First Utterance ( their first album)... you cannot compare it with the masterpiece from Tull, but you'll hear what I mean.. ;-)
@@mclarsj Thank you. I am familiar with Comus and enjoy their work. If you want to go waaaay deep down this rabbit hole check out Current 93, who I can only describe as industrial goth Pagan folk. It's not exactly easy listening, but it's worth the effort imo.
I've been surprised to see so many, many people identify "Songs From The Wood" as their number one favorite Tull album. Coincidentally, it seems to have been the first exposure to the discography for a lot of them as well. So, a younger set. (Not wholly, but an observed trend.) Having been familiar with all the albums from "Stand Up" through "Too Old To Rock 'N' Roll", I anticipated the release of "Songs From The Wood", and bought it the first day it came out in 1977. Its initial impression was of slicker production and pronounced use of synthesizer, neither perceived as a plus in the atmosphere of the time. Other Tull fans whom I knew expressed difficulty assimilating the new sound and feel of the record, preferring maybe the edge or personal quality of earlier favorites. In my case, as usual repeated listening helped with that. After about 45 years of attention to other realms of recorded music, reintroduction to "Songs From The Wood" has been a pleasant experience of fuller appreciation. I applaud the enthusiasm so widely expressed for it. I've listened to it more during the past months than I did when it was current. I find it mightily impressive in instrumental terms, with Barlow (and each member) contributing virtuosic components to the "genius" arrangements. Am especially engaged and edified by the recurrent medieval/traditional themed sections within various songs.
Back then I asked my girlfriend if she’d like to go see this band Jethro Tull. She misheard me saying why would I want to see a band call Death Road Toll!
