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. He wanders, but he returns home.
"Miles From Nowhere," "Wild World," "On the Road to Find Out," "Father and Son" are songs of leaving—travel through time and space. 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. All of this is a far cry, although only a causal link away, from Cat Stevens, "pop star" (listen to the song
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of the same title on his lovely
Mona Bone Jakon), subsequently a refugee from the glittering life, and later still, the TB ward.
Cat's melodies and lyrics are disarmingly, deceptively simple. He seems to fasten without effort onto tunes with a life of their own, tunes of small beginnings and wide resonances. 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.
There is an equally childlike and nursery-rhymish "On the Road to Find Out," which moves imperceptibly from fable to parable. Mixing theme and melody, I'd describe it as Dick Whittington meeting three blind mice, setting out to find London, and instead finding God. "Father and Son" is a dialogue between just that. 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.
Sometimes Cat places an overreliance 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. 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. (RS 76)
BEN GERSON
I get the tune and then I just keep on singing the tune until the words come out from the tune. It's kind of a hypnotic state that you reach after a while when you keep on playing it where words just evolve from it. So you take those words and just let them go whichever way they want.... "Moonshadow"? Funny, that was in Spain, I went there alone, completely alone, to get away from a few things. And I was dancin' on the rocks there ... right on the rocks where the waves were like blowin' and splashin'. Really, it was so fantastic. And the moon was bright, ya know, and I started dancin' and singin' and I sang that song and it stayed. It's just the kind of moment that you want to find when you're writin' songs.
– Cat Stevens to a Boston DJ
The immediate virtues of Teaser and the Firecat (A&M SP4313) have become pretty self-evident: it has already yielded three hit singles. Two of these hits are infectious but basically dreck, and I think their success can be attributed mainly to production coups. "Rubylove" has a pleasant enough tune, but it's the novelty of those two Zorbas on the bouzoukis that makes the song. "Peace Train" has a healthy dose of Cat's characteristic calypso funk, but what puts you through the windshield those first few times is all that hand-clapping and bass drum pedal.
Then there is "Moonshadow," a simple, unadorned song whose beauty lies in its mystery. I think that Cat could be dismissed as an ingenious and reliable composer of lightweight hits were it not for this rare strain of mystery, or puzzlement, that touches most of his finest songs. "Katmandu," "Longer Boats," and "Into White" are very vague songs, unfixed in time or space, offering no story line, giving us no handle on the singer's personality or his emotions. But like Zen riddles, the vivid, exotic images tease the imagination. This is not the painfully contrived exoticism of most pseudo-folk-songs. Nor should the provocative ambiguity of Cat's best lyrics be confused with the mangled English of his worst, "I'm being followed by a moonshadow." The phrase is as catchy as "somewhere over the rainbow," yet somehow it doesn't sound "thought-up," it sounds too original and natural for that.
In one of his new songs, Cat defines his songwriting method in highly romantic but entirely plausible terms: "I listen to the wind of my soul." Many of his lyrics seem to go straight from his subconscious and into the listener's completely by-passing the intellect. Even in his early pop star days, many of Cat's short, crude hit songs had the sound of weather reports from his subconscious. Not having developed much artistry or control, he sometimes let his thoughts escape in raw pathological form, set to absurdly inappropriate little pop melodies. For instance, "I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun," with its never-to-be-sufficient refrain of "I'm gonna get me a gun,/And all those people who put me down, better get ready to run."
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