Rock Island is the 17th studio album

Album

An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...

 by the British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 rock

Rock music

Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 group Jethro Tull

Jethro Tull (band)

Jethro Tull are a British rock group formed in 1967. Their music is characterised by the vocals, acoustic guitar, and flute playing of Ian Anderson, who has led the band since its founding, and the guitar work of Martin Barre, who has been with the band since 1969.Initially playing blues rock with...

, released in 1989.

The album continued the hard rock direction the band took on the previous effort, Crest of a Knave

Crest of a Knave

Crest of a Knave is the sixteenth studio album by British rock band Jethro Tull, released in 1987.The album relied more heavily on Martin Barre's electric guitar than the band had since the 1970s. However, several tracks still featured drum machine instead of a live drummer. Keyboardist Peter-John...

. The line-up now included Ian Anderson, Martin Barre

Martin Barre

Martin Lancelot Barre is an English rock musician.Barre has been the guitarist for rock band Jethro Tull since 1969. He has appeared on every Jethro Tull album except their debut This Was...

, Dave Pegg

Dave Pegg

Dave Pegg is an English multi-instrumentalist and record producer, arguably most visible as a bass guitarist. He is the longest-serving member of the pre-eminent electric folk band Fairport Convention and has been bassist with a number of important folk and rock groups including The Ian Campbell...

 and new drummer Doane Perry

Doane Perry

Doane Ethredge Perry is an American musician, composer and author. He has been working since 1984 as drummer and percussionist with Grammy award winning band Jethro Tull.-Early life:...

.

The staging on the 1989 tour supporting Rock Island featured projected silhouettes

Shadow play

Shadow play or shadow puppetry Shadow puppets have a long history in China, India, Turkey and Java, and as a popular form of entertainment for both children and adults in many countries around the world. A shadow puppet is a cut-out figure held between a source of light and a translucent screen...

 of lithe dancers during the song "Kissing Willie", ending with an image that bordered on pornographic. The song "Big Riff and Mando" reflects life on the road for the relentlessly touring musicians, giving a wry account of the theft of Barre's prized mandolin

Mandolin

A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family . It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single...

 by a stage-struck fan.

Side one

1. "Kissing Willie" - 3:32
2. "The Rattlesnake Trail" - 4:02
3. "Ears of Tin" - 4:55
4. "Undressed to Kill" - 5:25
5. "Rock Island" - 6:54

Side two

1. "Heavy Water" - 4:12
2. "Another Christmas Song" - 3:32
3. "The Whaler's Dues" - 7:53
4. "Big Riff and Mando" - 5:58
5. "Strange Avenues" - 4:10

Bonus tracks

The 2006 remastered CD added extensive liner notes and three bonus tracks, all recorded live in Zurich, Switzerland on October 13, 1989. These had previously been released on the UK CD single of "Another Christmas Song":

11. "A Christmas Song"
    
12. "Cheap Day Return"/"Mother Goose"
    
13. "Locomotive Breath"
    

Personnel

• Ian Anderson – vocals, flute, keyboards, Synclavier, mandolin, acoustic guitar, drums on tracks 2 & 7
• Martin Barre
  Martin Barre
  Martin Lancelot Barre is an English rock musician.Barre has been the guitarist for rock band Jethro Tull since 1969. He has appeared on every Jethro Tull album except their debut This Was...
  
   – guitars
• David Pegg
  Dave Pegg
  Dave Pegg is an English multi-instrumentalist and record producer, arguably most visible as a bass guitarist. He is the longest-serving member of the pre-eminent electric folk band Fairport Convention and has been bassist with a number of important folk and rock groups including The Ian Campbell...
  
   – bass guitar, acoustic bass, mandolin
• Doane Perry
  Doane Perry
  Doane Ethredge Perry is an American musician, composer and author. He has been working since 1984 as drummer and percussionist with Grammy award winning band Jethro Tull.-Early life:...
  
   – drums

Also featuring:

• Martin Allcock – keyboards on tracks 1 & 10
• Peter Vettese
  Peter-John Vettese
  Peter-John Vettese , also known as Peter Vettese, is a British keyboardist, songwriter, arranger and record producer....
  
  – additional keyboards on tracks 3, 4, 5 & 6

Introduction by Ian Anderson

In 2006, for the remastered CD, Anderson wrote an introduction to each song of the original album:

• Kissing Willie is a not-too-subtle approach to love and life behind grey factory walls. Actually bassist Dave Pegg inspired this one with a tale, imagined or real, who knows, of an awkward teenage mutual fumble behind the gasworks somewhere on the fringes of his home town of Birmingham in the Midlands of the UK. A rather over-the-top video went with this one and is not one of my proudest moments. Director Storm Jorgensen wanted a Benny Hill kind of thing and so I Bennied, dutifully. Regretfully.
• The Rattlesnake Trail is a medium tempo rocker of the ZZ Top persuasion. Guitar-based and never performed on stage. Just an excuse for a funky rocking good time.
• Ears Of Tin plays on the social disintegration of the West Highlands of Scotland. The move to the big city. The regrets. The longing.
• Undressed To Kill is a strip club through-the-keyhole, life of a working girl song. A certain sadness and grim determination lurks in the young female personality behind the lap-dance frivolity of the setting.
• Rock Island is a rather good song, I think. Loneliness and detachment. Fear of the far-off unknown. The rock island as metaphor for the isolated but familiar bubble into which we all sometimes retreat. The blue baby blanket security. Back to the womb. For beer, curry and a game of skittles.
• Heavy Water reflects on the environmental damage from Chernobyl but was inspired also by the horrors of the acid rain reality of 20th century industrial pollution. Memories of a hot and sticky New York City summer in the early seventies when the rainspots on my sleeve were an ominous black.
• Another Christmas Song is probably my favourite piece from the album, being generally uplifting in this sea of misery! It was actually written as a sequel to the original A Christmas Song, B-side on an early Tull single in 1968. It was also re-recorded for the Jethro Tull Christmas Album in 2003. A song of family togetherness, nostalgia and benevolence. The antithesis of the original, in some ways.
• The Whaler's Dues tackles the difficult subject of the moral question of whale-hunting, seen from the perspective of a seaman on board on a whaling ship. Set in the contemporary world, it in no way tries to condone or excuse the on-going practice but puts our hero (or villain) up in the dock for sentence and martyrdom. For all my Japanese and Icelandic friends to ponder on...
• Big Riff And Mando is based on the true event of the theft of Martin Barre's mandolin from backstage after a show somewhere in the USA a few months before. Martin was understandably distraught and I made plea via a helpful local Classic Rock radio station to the perpetrator. To our amazement, the mandoline was returned undamaged and lived to fight another day. Why did the thief take it? To brag out? To have as a souvenir? Or to keep for a few years until e-Bay was invented? Marty is Martin, obviously. Big Riff is the imagined thief and a little story is invented here to portray the character and his motives.
• Strange Avenues is a little sequel to the Aqualung setting of 1971. Sometimes it is so nice to revisit an earlier song and re-create, for a moment, the subject in another piece of invaded personal space. Nice musical arrangement and dramatic stuff. Must play it live again some day.