Locomotive Breath
by Jethro Tull
- 123
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 70
- Danceability
- 42
- Acousticness
Jethro Tull had trouble getting "Locomotive Breath" to work as a band. Ian Anderson has said it was an utter failure when they tried to play it all together, because it didn't gel. So the song was built by overdubs, one part at a time. John Evan recorded the piano intro. Anderson went out into the studio and clicked two drum sticks together. This was before click tracks. He played hi-hat and bass drum to that. Clive Bunker added tom-toms and cymbals, Anderson laid down the electric guitar rhythm part, and Martin Barre finished the electric guitar.
The metronomic feel was deliberate. The song is about a railway train and should click-clack in time. Anderson wrote the lyrics about the runaway train of population growth and capitalism. He was born in 1947 and noted that the planet's population has more than tripled in his lifetime.
It appeared on the 1971 album Aqualung. A censored edit came out as a US single that year, backed with "Wind-Up," and did not chart. A 1976 single, backed with "Fat Man," reached number 59 on the Billboard chart and number 85 in Canada. The band has used it as its concert encore since 1972.
Locomotive Breath runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.