Thick as a Brick 2

According to Anderson, TAAB 2 (which he pronounces /tæb ˈtuː/) focuses on Gerald Bostock, the fictional boy genius author of the original album, forty years later. "I wonder what the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock would be doing today. Would the fabled newspaper still exist?"^[2] The follow-up album presents five divergent, hypothetical life stories for Gerald Bostock, including a greedy investment banker, a homosexual homeless man, a soldier in the Afghan War, a sanctimonious evangelist preacher, and a most ordinary man who (married and childless) runs a corner store; by the end of the album, however, all five possibilities seem to converge in a similar concluding moment of gloomy or pitiful solitude.^[3] In March 2012, to follow the style of the mock-newspaper cover (The St Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser) of the original Thick as a Brick album, an online newspaper was set up, simply titled StCleve.

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Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
PopMatters	5/10[1]
Sputnik Music	4.0/5[5]

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AllMusic gave three stars to the album, calling it: "cleaner and streamlined, not as indulgent or idealistic as [Anderson's] younger work, boasting a more sensible structure, yet it still bears all of his signatures from the flute to rambling folk-rock".^[6]

The album debuted at No. 55 on the Billboard chart, at No. 13 in the German Albums Chart,^[7] at No. 12 in the Finnish Album Chart,^[8] at No. 19 in the Austrian Album Charts,^[9] at No. 30 in the Norwegian Album Charts,^[10] at No. 31 in the Swiss Album Charts,^[11] at number No. 74 on the Canadian Albums Chart,^[12] at No. 35 on the UK charts,^[13] at No. 76 in the Dutch Album Chart^[14] and at No. 99 on the Spanish charts.^[15]

Anderson performed the entire album live on tour in 2012.^[16] In August 2014, Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson released CD/DVD/Blu-ray Thick as a Brick - Live in Iceland. The concert was recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland on 22 June 2012 and featured complete Thick as a Brick and Thick as a Brick 2 performances by the Ian Anderson Touring Band.^[17]

The original Thick as a Brick consists of only two long tracks comprising a single song, while TAAB 2 lists 17 separate songs merged into 13 distinct tracks (some labelled as medleys), although also all flowing together much like a single song.

The 2-disc edition includes a DVD-9 with the following contents:

• Audio:
  • 5.1 Surround Mix
  • Super Quality 24-bit Stereo Mix
• Video:
  • TAAB2 "The making of" Video
  • Studio recording sessions, interviews and more
  • The Lyric Reading Video (Anderson)
• DVD-ROM:
  • Multilingual Lyric Translations (pdf files)
  • www.StCleve.com Web Pages (pdf)

Musicians

• Ian Anderson – vocals, flutes, acoustic guitars
• Florian Opahle – electric guitar
• John O'Hara – accordion, Hammond organ, piano, keyboards
• Pete Judge – trumpet, flugelhorn, tenor horn, E-flat tuba
• Ryan O'Donnell – additional vocals
• David Goodier – bass guitar, glockenspiel
• Scott Hammond – drums, percussion

Production

• Steven Wilson – mixing engineer
• Mike Downs – recording engineer
• Ian Anderson – liner notes
• Peter Mew – mastering engineer

• Thick as a Brick
• Thick as a Brick - Live in Iceland