What are your top 10 Jethro Tull songs?

I think I agree. Aqualung, Benefit, and Stand Up in particular may not be the proggiest little records ever to prog... but they're each fantastic and immersive in their own way. Stand Up has this strong and lingering jazziness from the first album (which is also quite good!), just beginning to meld itself to more classical or baroque sounds, and of course rock and blues are still the meat and potatoes of the band. Benefit is a whole different cat. The jazz has seeped too deep into the recipe to be recognizable any more, and the guitars have gotten chunkier, weightier, more uncompromising. If Jethro Tull had deserved the first metal grammy it would have been for this album. There's a dark and wispy cast to the album, from melodies to production, which makes it wholly unique, if a bit dense. And then there's Aqualung. Sudden clarity after the thick fog. The heaviness remains but is used more wisely, and more sparingly. Every instrument is at the band's beck and call, but with the implicit understanding that not everything should be used at once. All ideas are on the table, but not all of them must be used all the time. It's the beautiful balancing act and patient execution which make this album special. These elements would be gradually lost over the next two records in favor of a more maximalist approach to prog. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially as they produced some of their best records with this approach. However, by the time Anderson sees fit to write more than one song per album again, that maximal philosophy has begun to border on overstimulating. The albums are still great overall, but the songs are a bit more muddled than they used to be, oversaturated with good ideas. I'm more likely to spin Benefit than War Child, or Stand Up than TOTRARTYTD. The discography has a great run from Stand Up through Storm Watch, but in some ways it's quite a different band that emerged out the other end of the 70s.

Hunting Girl

Velvet Green

Mother Goose

A Time for Everything

My God

Life's a Long Song

Only Solitaire

Bouree

Flying Dutchman

Aqualung