DEREK SHULMAN Talks "In A Glass House" Album Reissue, Signing PANTERA & DREAM THEATER, And More

When Gentle Giant recorded In a Glass House in 1973, the band was in crisis. Founding member Phil Shulman had just left, reducing the band from a six-piece to five, and the remaining members were far from certain they would carry on at all. The album was written and recorded in roughly four weeks, with an American tour looming and no time to second-guess anything. "It was a transitional period," Derek Shulman told Rodrigo Altaf. "What was released was, I think, great music, but not finished the way that we would love to have finished it." That unfinished quality haunted the record for decades. A new remix — made possible despite the absence of the original multitracks — has given the album the treatment the band always wanted it to have, and for Shulman, the effect has been genuinely transformative. "It changed for me from an album that was very difficult to listen to, to become my favorite album." The darkness in In a Glass House was circumstantial rather than deliberate. Shulman stepped into the frontman role fully for the first time and took on the bulk of the lyric writing. The loss of his brother Phil compressed whatever the band was into something leaner and more brittle. "The album was dark and brittle-sounding because of the situation, both emotionally and probably because I had to embrace being the front man completely," he said. "It streamlined the band, actually. And I think that's what In a Glass House was." What made Gentle Giant distinct across their entire catalog, and what In a Glass House exemplifies, is a resistance to self-indulgence that other progressive bands of the era struggled to maintain. Shulman credits a short attention span as much as any artistic philosophy. "We probably had ADD," he said. "Periods of things where other bands would have three or four minutes or five minutes trying to do something — after four or eight bars of something, we probably got bored with it. We had a very low boredom threshold." Rather than cutting those passages entirely, the band kept the themes and compressed them. It became, Shulman argued, something unique to Gentle Giant: the structural complexity of progressive rock without the tendency toward navel-gazing. The band's isolation from the London scene helped. Based in Portsmouth on the south coast of England, they had no particular interest in what other bands were doing and no awareness of being part of any movement. "There was no such thing as prog back in the day," Shulman said. "We just did our own thing. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't care. We just did what we did for the love of music." He also pushed back on the idea that Gentle Giant was ever a solemn proposition. Other bands of their era wanted to be treated with the reverence of an orchestra. Gentle Giant wanted the audience to smile. "We had fun playing our music. We had fun playing together. We wanted the audience to enjoy being part of the experience. So that was being self-indulgent — we indulged in having fun." The band played stadiums in Europe and Canada — 30,000 people at the Autostade in Montreal, shows at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto — even if American commercial success stayed out of reach. That reality, Shulman said, generated no real frustration. "The most important thing for us was that we were able to play in front of people who enjoyed what we did. And that gave us a great deal of pleasure." Gentle Giant disbanded in 1980, and Shulman has turned down reunion offers ever since. The reasoning is simple and stated without nostalgia: "To become a parody of yourself, of when you were younger, would be bad for us," he said. "Getting into size 30 waist when you're actually 36 now, putting spandex on when you look like an older guy — it doesn't work for me, anyway. When we stopped, that was the end of that chapter, and it was a wonderful chapter." The In a Glass House reissue arrives with the weight of a record finally getting its due — cleaned up, rebalanced, and freed from the grief that made it hard to hear for so long. For Shulman, it marks the end of a long detour back to something he is now proud to revisit #GentleGiant #DerekShulman #InAGlassHouse #Interview #RodrigoAltaf #Progressive Rock