The Jethro Tull Christmas Album is the 21st studio album released by Jethro Tull, in September 2003. This is the band’s last studio album as of 2021 (although a new studio album, The Zealot Gene, has been announced for early 2022), as well as the last album to feature the lineup of Ian Anderson, guitarist Martin Barre, bassist Johnathan Noyce, keyboardist Andrew Giddings, and drummer Doane Perry.
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album is a mix of new material, re-recordings of Tull’s own suitably themed material and arrangements of traditional Christmas music. In 2009, the live album Christmas at St Bride’s 2008 was included with the original album on CD.
Of the opening song, Birthday Card at Christmas, Ian Anderson has said: “My daughter Gael, like millions of other unfortunates, celebrates her birthday within a gnat’s whisker of Christmas. Overshadowed by the Great Occasion, such birthdays can be flat, perfunctory and fleetingly token in their uneventful passing. The daunting party and festive celebration of the Christian calendar overshadows too, some might argue, the humble birthday of one Mr. J. Christ. Funny old 25ths, Decembers…”
Featuring an organic folk-rock sound reminiscent of the band’s mid to late 1970s incarnations, the album mixes new material, re-recordings of Jethro Tull’s own suitably themed material and arrangements of traditional Christmas music.
Finaly Jethro Tull recorded another song cleverly entitled ‘Another Christmas Song’ for this album.
