Living in the Past - 2001 Remaster

"Living in the Past" is Jethro Tull's highest-charting single on the US Billboard and UK Singles charts. It first appeared as a 1969 single which had been recorded for their album Stand Up; however, it saw album release on Living in the Past in 1972. One of the most famous aspects of this song is its nonstandard time signature: It uses 5/4. This puts it in the category of "quintuple meter," where there's five beats per measure. If you need some more familiar context, try singing the lyrics to "Living in the Past" to the tune from the theme from the TV show Mission: Impossible. But not too loud, lest the whole office hear you. Maybe the most famous example of this unusual time signature is "Take Five" by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Ian Anderson is one of the most intellectual popular artists in rock, and also one with the sliest sense of humor (trust us, we interviewed Ian). So "Living in the Past" is clearly poking fun at somebody, being about wishing to live in a peaceful time before a war. But is it directed at the fighters ("Now there's revolution, but they don't know what they're fighting"), or at the ones who chose to close their eyes to the fighting? We'll leave it to the jury. Here's what Ian told us: "Two or three times I have in the early days tried to write something that was deliberately in a more pop context. 'Living in the Past' was written specifically as a single, albeit a little bit of an oddball song, being in 5/4 time signature, it wasn't obviously the choice of a listening public to have a complex time signature. But I tried to work within that framework of doing something that set out with a non-common time signature, but would have some catchy appeal because of the musical rhymes and the title, and that succeeded."

As quoted in a 1984 interview for the UK music magazine Kerrang!, Ian Anderson said of this song: "To be honest, I've always loathed and detested that song. In fact, when it was first a hit, I used to hide in a corner and cringe. But the guys in the band now are keen to play it, and you know, I'm beginning to grow accustomed to the damn thing."