“Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull

"Locomotive Breath" is the hard-charging workhorse of Jethro Tull's Aqualung, released in March 1971, and it's built to sound like a runaway train: a chugging, relentless rhythm that just keeps picking up steam. Ian Anderson wrote it out of his growing alarm about overpopulation, and he later described it as a song about the unstoppable run of population growth and capitalism, a train nobody can get off.

The band makes the metaphor physical. John Evan's piano and Martin Barre's electric guitar lay down the rails, Clive Bunker and Jeffrey Hammond Hammond drive the engine, and Anderson's flute whistles through the smoke. He produced it with Terry Ellis. It came out twice as a single, became a live favorite, and remains one of Tull's best-known songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.