A Passion Play

Digitally remastered reissue of 1973 album includes the enhanced bonus track 'The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles' & theatre programme (enhanced section taken from the album 25 Years Of Jethro Tull Longform VHS video release). Includes liner notes written by Ian Anderson. Chrysalis. 2003.

Following quickly on the heels of their career-defining Aqualung and Thick as a Brick, Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull demonstrated that their musical and thematic ambitions were as muscular as ever on 1973's Passion Play. But if Thick was a bit tongue in cheek about its conceptual conceits, Passion was a dizzying example of the prog-rock era's overweening musical aspirations at their zenith. Anderson now sums up it its obtuse, theater-as-metaphor libretto as "the theme of post-death meanderings in another world," but the sheer propulsive tension of Tull's sprawling musical interplay insures its folk-rooted baroque and roll a tight orbit around this mortal coil for nearly the album's entirety. This digitally remastered, enhanced CD edition features the complete video for the album's Lewis Carroll-esque interlude "The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles," a theatrical program and typically self-effacing new introduction by Ian Anderson. --Jerry McCulley