My mother and I don’t have very many things in common, and in fact for quite some time I avoided becoming a fan of Jethro Tull because she liked to play along with some of their songs on her flute. I probably don’t like them in the same way that she does, of course. I listen a lot of their stuff from the ’80s, stuff that most Tull fans turn their nose up at. (They especially despise the Under Wraps album, and I adore it.)

Because the song “Steel Monkey” played on the radio a bit when I was starting my music collection in a big way, I picked up Crest of a Knave, the Grammy winning “heavy metal” album. (There are layers of irony in the fact that so many people were incensed because “Metallica should have won it!” Now, of course, it’s fashionable to loathe Metallica… go figure.) During my later boxed-set craze I acquired the compact disc rendition of the 5-LP box, 20 Years of Jethro Tull, a 3 disc set that seems to have vanished in favor of a single-disc Highlights sampler rather quickly. The 20 Years material guided me through the back catalog, and while I did pick up a couple of their later releases I just don’t have the same fondness for their post-Rock Island work that I do for the “middle years” material. With that said, I do highly recommend the live A Little Light Music album from 1992. It’s worth the cost almost for the stage banter alone. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing sometimes.

I’m a weirdo, in case you’d forgotten.

At any rate, let’s play three of my very favorite Tull tunes. “Broadsword” comes from 1982’s excellent Broadsword and the Beast, “Heat” is off of the highly electronic Under Wraps, and “Part of the Machine” was the sole new piece of music on the 20 Years compilation. (It shows up on a recent reissue of Crest of a Knave as a bonus track, for what that’s worth.)

Next week we’ll come home for some fluffy American ’80s pop/rock music, the kind that Grandma… never used to make, come to think on it.