Metal Rules Interview with Ian Anderson

MR: I saw a car commercial not too long ago using "Thick As A Brick." How
did that come about?

IA: Well, through my publishers, Chrysalis Music, who phoned me up and said
there's this company, Hyundai, and they want to do an ad using some music
from "Thick As A Brick" and they need your permission and I said, "Well, I
don't have a problem with that," but given that they wanted to re-record a
sort of 30 or 60 second version of it, I said, "Well fine, but if they're
going to re-record it, maybe they want me to do it for them, because I can
do that pretty quickly."

So we agreed that I would re-record it and they sent me a story board, and
specific timings, and I had a pretty good idea of how the ad was going to
run. I just put together a couple of different versions and sent it back to
them. And then they tore them apart and put them back together in a slightly
different order, which wasn¹t actually the way I intended it to be anyway,
but for whatever reason they edited it the way they wanted it run but it¹s
me playing. They left off all the nice flutey bits at the end, which was the
best bit, but it is actually me playing. So I took about three hours to play
a few different instruments on that and put it together.

MR: Well, it's aired quite a bit over here, for what it¹s worth. I don¹t
even remember what car it is.

IA: Well, they could have sent me the money or maybe about seven cars!
(Laughs)

MR: Or maybe a wheel?

Ian talks about that car commercial using "Thick and a Brick" and much more.

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