Two of the songs are truly outstanding: arty little "Sad Lisa" and the calypso-styled "Longer Boats." The latter has the stuff to become a classic that will be sung forty years hence. The best I can come up with is that he sounds a bit like a one-man Jethro Tull while sounding like a deeper-voiced Neil Young - and, yes, I'm aware of the great distance between those guideposts. Truly good vocalists - those who can hit the right note, have genuinely pleasant-sounding voices, and can convey delicate emotional nuances - are so rare I cannot think of anyone to compare Cat Stevens to. If that isn't enough, he also did the drawing for the cover of the jacket and did it well enough to convince me he could make a good living as a commercial artist. In it he plays guitar with economy and drive and sings - to put it quite simply - better than any male solo vocalist now active in pop music. For it, Cat Stevens wrote three kinds of songs - good, very good, and excellent. My reference list of slightly battered hip phrases defines "monster" as "fantastic, tremendous, etc." This album is a monster. If you've been listening to Donovan, Joni Mitchell, et al., though not necessarily these people, there's no reason you shouldn't be listening to Cat Stevens.Ĭat Steven's new album Tea for the Tillerman may not make him the rage of two or more continents, but that's mostly because even poetic justice is so elusive these days. Sometimes Cat places an over-reliance on dynamics for dramatic effect also, his keyboard and guitar playing seem a bit amateurish, although that in itself has a certain charm - he's just a folk singer, you know. Father, in a plea for the boy to stay, manages to reduce a complex thought to a trickle of words, "For you will still be here tomorrow but your dreams may not." To the boy, "From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen." Cat skillfully betrays a vested interest in neither role. "Father and Son" is a dialogue between just that. Mixing theme and melody, I'd describe it as Dick Whittington meeting three blind mice, setting out to find London, and instead finding God. There is an equally childlike and nursery-rhymish "On the Road to Find Out," which moves imperceptibly from fable to parable.
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He applies to them a furry voice with a kind of glottal buzz - perfect for the calypso "Longer Boats," while adding the right touch of seasoning to an ageless folk song like "Into White": "I built my house from barley rice/ Green pepper walls, and water ice/ tables of paper wood, windows of light/ And everything emptying into White." It really must be heard. He seems to fasten without effort onto tunes with a life of their own, tunes of small beginnings and wide resonances. All of this is a far cry, although only casual link away, from Cat Stevens, "pop star" (listen to the song of the same title on his lovely Mona Bone Jakon), subsequently a refugee from the glittering life, and later still, the TB ward.Ĭat's melodies and lyrics are disarmingly, deceptively simple. Every song is an excursion into Cat's personal world together they constitute an album affirming the simple life and the individual's search for values. "Miles From Nowhere," "Wild World," "On the Road to Find Out," "Father and Son" are songs of leaving - travel through time and space. Is it on the roads of Provence or the tube to Portobello Road that I visualize Cat? He is both the next in a long line of troubadours and very much the London neighborhood musician, encompassing at once the allure of the exotic and the ability to domesticate it.
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