Entertainment
Yusuf/ Cat Stevens' "Tea for the Tillerman"
In this episode of Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums, Brittany Spanos explores Cat Stevens' iconic album 'Tea for the Tillerman,' released in 1970. The podcast delves into Stevens�...
Yusuf/ Cat Stevens' "Tea for the Tillerman"
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Interactive Transcript
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It's your man Nick Cannon, I'm here to bring you my new podcast, Nick Cannon at night.
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Whenever I wrote a song, I wrote it kind of from the heart, from the soul, really.
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And with my view towards the future and where I was going and where I wanted to go,
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my art was my life and music was my religion basically.
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I was totally devoted. I still wasn't who I ended up to be or where I am today,
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but it was the beginning of my forming and my character, which a lot of people connected with.
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But tell me, why do the children play?
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Kat Stevens was just 22 when he released Teeth of the Tiller Man in November of 1970.
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It was one of the defining albums of the folk rock era, a time when soft,
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introspective records by James Taylor and the Carpenter's sold by the millions.
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But Teeth for the Tiller Man was more than a collection of gentle love songs.
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For Stevens, it was also a search for higher meaning.
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With songs that asked big questions about God in the afterlife,
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the generation gap between a father and son and the environment.
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Teeth for the Tiller Man became Stevens' breakthrough album in America,
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and the start of a lifelong spiritual journey.
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I'm Brittany Spanos, senior writer for Rolling Stone, and this is Rolling Stones 500
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greatest albums on Amazon Music. The podcast we're redig into 10 albums of our brand new list.
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In this episode, Kat Stevens, T for the Tiller Man.
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Oh, baby, it's a wild world.
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And I always remember you like a child girl.
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Kat Stevens' path would eventually take him far away from the world of secular music.
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He became a devout Muslim and renamed himself Yusuf Islam.
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But even though he moved away from Teeth for the Tiller Man,
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his fans never did. And when Yusuf finally returned to music in the early 2000s,
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those fans packed theaters and arenas around the world.
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Here is Rolling Stone's staff writer Angie Martosio with the full story.
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Before he was Yusuf Islam, before he was even Kat Stevens, he was Steven Dmitry Georgeu,
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born to parents of Swedish and Greek descent in London in 1948.
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It was really an amazing moment in time for me to be born and to be born where I was
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in the center of London's West End. Just the stones were away from Tim Pan Ali,
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which was where the stones first recorded their first demo,
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where I recorded my first demo, all the kind of music shops around there,
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all the coffee bars, all the theaters.
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You know, so it was obvious that I was born in a bit of a tinsel box.
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And life, to me, was all entertaining.
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It's definitely shaped my view of life.
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Stevens was restless as a child and he'd often get in fights in school.
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But he found comfort in painting and drawing.
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The other kids even called him artist boy.
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In the mid-60s, he enrolled at a one-year course at the Hammersmith School of Art,
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and he thought he'd become a cartoonist.
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It seemed to me a really groovy way to express yourself,
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but I used to play a lot of music while I was painting or drawing.
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And music just started to permeate my life.
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I began with my sister's record collection, which had a whole lot of classical stuff in it,
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like Beethoven, Chakowski, and there was the musicals like Paulian Besson,
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and then of course a long-came West Side Story.
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And that was like, wow, that was so massive in my life.
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That set me off.
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But then of course the Beatles, well, nobody could deny that that was the turning point.
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When you saw these four guys, it just suddenly take over the world.
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It was amazing.
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And at 18, Stevens was discovered by producer Mike Hurst.
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I kind of hunted him down really and then made him listen.
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And then when he did, he just loved what he heard.
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And I loved my dog, was the first song.
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And I had the name at that point, Cat Stevens,
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because I thought, well, Steven Demetri Georgia ain't going to cut it,
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not in the record shops.
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So I had to get that name.
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And that was given to me in a way by my girlfriend at the time.
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I can't remember if she said, your eyes look like a cat or the way you sit.
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It looks like a cat.
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It was one of those.
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But shortly after finding success as a songwriter,
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Stevens got really sick.
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I was doing three shows a night.
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And to do that, I had to sort of drink a bit of port and brandy to get myself up there.
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Smoking and not sleeping well and going up and down the country
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and kind of a back of a van.
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All that kind of took its toll.
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And eventually, it was, I was coughing, you know.
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And I had this cold.
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It seemed to be a cold.
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And the doctor first prescribed some, you know, simple medicine for me
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and antibiotics, whatever.
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But then, of course, it got so bad one day, I was writing and I was coughing.
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And I saw blood on the keys.
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Wow, oh God, we better find out what this is.
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They discovered it was tuberculosis.
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He was admitted to a hospital and then he spent a year recovering in isolation.
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We all know about lockdown now, whatever it's like.
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Because when you've got that kind of contagious disease, which it was, you know,
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you're really isolated totally.
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And so I was one of the inmates and I had my own room,
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I had my view to the kind of the gardens.
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Well, actually, wasn't a garden.
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It was a bit of a parking space and I saw an old rusty van out of there.
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But anyway, other people got the best view.
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I was just stuck there.
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But all that alone time turned out to be a gift.
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Because it allowed Stevens to focus on his art without distraction.
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I had a book with me, very spiritual sort of introduction to Buddhism.
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And I started using that isolation to delve into my psyche and to find out who I was.
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It was kind of like a journey within.
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And of course, I had all the space and the quiet and peace that I needed to do that.
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So that was really a big chance for me to begin my journey.
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That's when Stevens stopped writing pop songs and began crafting a series of
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mellow introspective tunes.
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I mean, after that, there was no more songs like
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Better Bring Another Bottle With You Baby.
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It was totally an hour.
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I wish I knew.
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I wish I knew, you know, miles from nowhere on the road to find out.
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And Father of Son, of course.
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It was soon after that Stevens formed a really important friendship
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with producer and bassist Paul Samal Smith,
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who had been a founding member of the Yard Birds.
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Samal Smith vividly remembers his first meeting with Stevens.
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Chris Blackwell from Ireland Records phoned me and said,
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we've got a guy we'd like you to listen to.
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And I had heard his stuff.
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And he lived above a cafe in the Shasby Avenue that his father ran.
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And I walked up the stairs and went into his sort of working bedroom,
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which had tapes and things all over the place.
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And he sang and played about 30 songs that day,
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which comprised most of the first three albums,
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Murder, Bum Jack, and Teeth of the Tillermann.
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And Tees of the Farca.
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They were all kind of lurking.
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And Samal Smith introduced Stevens to another important collaborator.
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Alan Davis, very important figure in both of our lives.
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Alan very often played guitar along with you,
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so while we didn't have bass drums, guitars, and whatever,
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we definitely had guitar or two guitars there.
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That was always focused on you, sir.
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Alan Davies had recently returned to session work.
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Following the breakup of his band,
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Sweet Thursday in 1969.
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At first, he was a little wary of Stevens.
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I turned up there with my phone guitar.
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I wonder what I was in for.
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Because the last time I'd seen him
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was on TV, on top of the props,
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doing, I'm going to get the organ.
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No guitar, dance moves,
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not my sort of stuff.
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And that afternoon,
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you know, as he took out the guitar and
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started to gently explain his songs, play with them,
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I thought this is a changed man.
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Stevens worked with Samal Smith and Davies on his first of two records that year
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in 1970, Mona Bone Jackin.
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It wasn't a big hit, but they knew they were onto something
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and headed back into the studio.
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Tillerman, you know, we didn't really know what we were making
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when we started brewing.
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That album, we were all running on instinct.
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I was just such a serious artist and musician.
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I just wanted to get it right.
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I was always looking for that perfection,
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looking for something that was not going to be easily disposable.
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I had something that really meant something.
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I think that's one of the secrets why the music has lasted
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because I did what's so much into it,
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into the art of the writing,
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and the emotion of the singer,
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I had to make sure that I felt the song when I sang it,
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and the musicianship and the quality of the production.
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All that had to be pretty perfect.
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Stevens recorded a few different studios,
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including the brand new Morgan Studios in London.
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It was so comfortable.
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It was like home and that was the way Paul
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created the atmosphere within the studio for me.
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Very comfortable.
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And all my friends, who are now my musicians,
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my band, it was just so nice.
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And that's what you can feel and what you can hear
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when you listen to Tilliman.
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Davies remember something else they liked about the studio.
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They had a bar and that was crying for me.
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It was built basically by musicians, for musicians.
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drummer Harvey Burns and bassist John Ryan
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also joined the sessions.
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Harvey Burns was magnificent.
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He was so delicate with his kit.
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You know, it was a small kit.
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And a lot of the time he'd use brushes,
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which was great, because it sat in so nicely
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with the strumming of my guitar and what
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fingerwork Alan was doing.
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And then we had John Ryan on bass,
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beautiful, but you could hardly see the guy,
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you know, like this thing is so small.
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He said, where are you?
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Oh, there you are.
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Okay.
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Stevens had a handful of songs that reflected this quest
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for self-discovery that he had been on since he was stuck
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in the hospital with tuberculosis.
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One track in particular,
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on the road to find out, sort of hints at this exploration.
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It was pretty much a kind of miniature prophecy,
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if you like, very small p,
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but you know, it did kind of explain what was going to happen to me.
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Time is running out.
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And it's always one.
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It's continuously running out.
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So until we meet our final date,
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we're looking at the road ahead.
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And then I conclude with the book,
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which is a symbol of sacred knowledge.
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I didn't have Bible in mind,
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but of course I've been reading this Buddhist book, you know,
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so I knew that knowledge was in there,
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but one had to find it,
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and one had to read it,
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one had to absorb it, and learn it.
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So I understood that.
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And that's what that song became.
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We kind of a real quite descriptive autobiography.
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Teah for the Tillermann opens with this song,
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which was inspired by Stephen's childhood in London.
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Where did the Tillerm play?
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That was my story, you know.
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I grew up in the concrete metropolis.
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I had a tree outside,
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but it was kind of bare.
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There was always this dream of the green fields, you know, and beyond.
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And for kids, you know, for us,
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all our playgrounds were concrete.
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So if you hit your head, if you fell, you know, it really hurt,
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and that's what kids do.
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So that was tough,
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and I just got inspired by that.
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The song wasn't just about his own life, though.
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It also showed Stephen's dissatisfaction with the modern world,
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and his concerns about the environment.
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Well, I think it's fine.
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Building jungle plains.
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They were building the jumbo.
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That was like the first year that he got launched,
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was when the album came out.
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So the jumbo playing was big, it was monstrous.
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And there was this, you know, massive thing flying up.
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And the whole of the modern world format,
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which was beginning to become clearer.
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People talking about, you know, things that you wouldn't think about,
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like, youth and easier, and, you know,
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that's also reflected in the song, you know.
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Will you tell us when to live?
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Will you tell us when to die?
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Will you tell us when to die?
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So the future looked like it needed to be naturalized again.
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And that was just an inspired song,
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based on those thoughts and those views.
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These big themes also helped inspire this song,
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Stephen's first American hit.
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It was the world around me.
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It was what was going on, you know, in Vietnam,
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it was what goes on in the streets,
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what's happening, and what kind of darkness there is out there.
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Wild World peeked at number 11 on the pop charts,
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and has since been covered by everyone,
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from Jimmy Cliff to Betmiddler.
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The song is also obviously about a breakup.
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Oh, we make a lot of nice friends out there.
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It was about my relationship with Paddy Darbynville at the time.
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Paddy Darbynville's an actress.
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She was featured in Andy Warhol's films.
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And after dating Stephens, she was linked to Mick Jagger.
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You know, she wanted to do her thing,
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but I wasn't really that happy with her,
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not being kind of with me all the time.
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So therefore it was kind of the meaning
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behind saying goodbye in a kind of nice way,
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but also being very considerate,
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if you like, and hoping for the best for her.
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Oh baby, baby, it's a wild world.
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It's hard to get by, just upon the smile.
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But there's a strain of thought
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that views wild world as misogynistic,
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that it's condescending.
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The late critic, Ellen Willis, famously poigned this out
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in a 1971 essay, saying,
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it's hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover
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that he's too innocent for the big bad world out there.
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So how does Stephens respond to the idea
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that his first big hit was sexist?
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Yeah, perhaps it is.
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But then again, it could be the voice of a mother
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talking to her daughter as she leaves her home.
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For university.
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I mean, this could be interpreted many different ways.
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Regardless, Davies and Sam Elsmith say that wild world
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sums up all that's great about Stephens in a single song.
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I can't believe it.
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It's what's in 50 years now, isn't it?
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I mean, how do you mix all that's amazing?
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It's still doing well and still being recognized.
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It's just great.
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Had no idea at the time.
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Then there's Father and Son,
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a heartbreaking ballot about the generation gap
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that so many families felt at the height of the Vietnam War.
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The fact that Stephens was really close with his dad hardly mattered.
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I found myself as a father and the son at the same time,
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kind of weirdly, but I could speak to myself.
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We have conversations with ourselves all the time.
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If you think about it, you're always going,
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well, should I do this?
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No.
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Well, maybe I should.
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Okay, you're talking to yourself.
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This is a little bit more extreme,
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but it's the same kind of principle.
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It's not time to make a change.
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Just relax.
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Take it easy.
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You're still young.
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That's your fault.
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There's so much you have to know.
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The track stems from a project Stephens wanted to work on
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following his recovery from tuberculosis.
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It was, of all things, a musical about the Russian Revolution.
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When I came out of isolation,
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I came in touch with a theatrical agent
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and I thought maybe he could help me achieve one of my life's goals,
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which was to write a musical.
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And we had this idea and it was about these parallel stories
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of the royal family.
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And this peasant family in the countryside where
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they were just ordinary workers and they'd tilt the land.
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And there was the father who wanted to keep things as they were,
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but the son had heard about the revolution
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and he just couldn't hold himself.
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He wanted to join the march.
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And I do, he turns away.
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The game has always been the same.
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I'm on the sunside for sure.
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I'm definitely on for the revolution.
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All these years later,
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the song still moves fans to tears.
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It's really becoming integral to so many people's lives.
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That's a beautiful thing about the gift of music
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and what it can do to you.
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And you wouldn't be able to do that if I didn't cry in the first place.
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I mean, that was, you know, emotion.
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Riding the song.
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Even after he left art school in 1966,
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Stevens continued to draw on paint.
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He even designed many of his own album covers.
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For T for the Tillermann,
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he painted a whimsical scene of a man drinking tea.
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But who is this Tillermann?
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Could be Father Christmas in disguise with a sort of red dye beard
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or something like that.
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I'm not sure.
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To me, the Tillermann was the center of the whole scene, obviously.
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And he was the man of the earth,
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the man who cared for and looked after and tilled the earth.
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So he had a very important part to play in the world.
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That's the way I see it.
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But he was having a break.
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He was having a little tea break.
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Tea for the Tillermann was released on November 23rd, 1970.
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It went triple platinum and established Stevens
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as a leading voice in folk rock,
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along with artists like Neil Young and James Taylor
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that were categorized as mellow singer songwriters.
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Everybody was doing something from their own perspective.
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And that was the whole key to it.
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I mean, this singer songwriter was all to do with how you saw the world.
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I don't know how much they have delved into the, you know, the spiritual path.
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Perhaps they haven't as much as what I've done.
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I mean, you've got Neil Young.
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He's talking about, you know, old man looking at the future
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and what age and what years do to you.
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Sweet baby James.
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I mean, he was sweet baby James, wasn't he?
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He was perfectly sweet.
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And that connected because it was real.
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Tillermann kicked off a hot streak for Stevens.
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His neck's record, 1971's teaser and the firecat,
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included the hit, Peace Train, and reached number two on the American charts.
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Later that year, his music was featured in the soundtrack
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for Hal Ashbees, Harold and Mod.
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And Stevens enjoyed the spotlight for a little while.
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Well, it was great, apart from the fact that the biggest problem my fan was always
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getting on stage and trying to reproduce what I'd done in the studio.
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And so you had to relive it.
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But still, it seemed to come across.
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A lot of people loved my concerts because they were quite, they were quite passionate.
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Stevens continued to release hit albums in the 70s.
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But everything changed for him one day in 1976.
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He went swimming in the ocean off of Malibu and started to drown.
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Flailing in the water, he plunged allegiance to God if he'd save him.
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When he survived, Stevens converted to Islam.
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A couple years later, he changed his name to use of Islam
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and walked away from the music industry.
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He never even picked up a guitar.
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I asked producer Paul Samal Smith what that was like for him.
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I guess I felt a bit like losing a friend when he came away from the business.
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Because it was something he just did so naturally.
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You could sit him in a chair and put a guitar in his hands and he did it.
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But for me, that's where God lives.
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It's when you sit someone like out Stevens in a chair and have him sing and play it.
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And that, ah, please, it's beautiful.
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During this time, you said to me, he didn't even think about T for the Tillerman.
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No, no. It was a little bit intimidating, I would say.
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There's another thing you've got to know is that when you have such a successful record,
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it kind of says to you, beat that.
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You're trying to compete with yourself.
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You can see that in the way that the Beatles also recorded their songs,
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you know, up until Sergeant Pepper's Lone House Club Band.
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You can see how they progressed towards that point.
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And they continue to want to improve and not necessarily look back.
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That was probably what the same kind of emotion and attitude that I had towards Tillerman.
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I needed to progress. I needed to go further.
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But the great thing was that the songs were already defining my spiritual path.
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And so I just had to walk it.
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You said for turn to music in the early 2000s, eventually releasing the album and other cup.
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Under the name, Yousef.
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And slowly, he began playing his old songs live.
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Not like but in on an old suit, because this suit was made out of my fibers,
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my bones, my flesh, my soul.
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And those songs are just connections with people.
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When I sing them, we connect. It's great.
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Yousef's journey came full circle in 2020, when he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Tillerman
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by re-recording the album as T for the Tillerman 2.
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That was my son's idea.
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And I felt it was a great challenge to then go back.
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And again, you see, this is intimidation thing.
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So when I do it, I sort of did it with the kind of slight wink at this perfect model.
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And saying, see what I can do.
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And I just, it was for the fun of it in a way.
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And it's great because it's very loose.
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I mean, it was done very quickly.
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It wasn't really as like I used to record.
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I used to be so, so, so, so serious.
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This is much easier, much more casual.
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But I think it's come out really well too.
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It's got a living breath to it.
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Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,
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Yousef planned the tour behind the album and performed the record straight through.
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He's still considering it when it's safe to tour again.
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But will you keep on building high
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Till there's no more room up there?
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I asked Yousef.
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If he'd found the answer he was searching for
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on his quest for self-discovery
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That he started 50 years ago.
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I've got to be a little bit bold and say,
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Yes, to the majority of that question.
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I know we've come a long way.
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We're changing day to day.
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A towny, where do the children play?
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Cat Stevens T for The Tillermann
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ranks 205th on Rolling Stones new, greatest albums of all time list.
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After this short break, we'll talk about the album's impact
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and Stevens own Soul Searching.
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We'll be right back.
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On Boxing Day 2018,
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20-year-old Joy Morgan was last seen her church,
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Israel United in Christ, or IUIC.
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I just went on my Snapchat and I just see her face
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lost everywhere.
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This is the missing sister,
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the true story of a woman betrayed by those she trusted most.
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IUIC is my family and like the best family that I've ever had.
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But IUIC isn't like most churches.
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This is a devilish cult.
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You know when you get that feeling right,
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you just, I don't want to be here.
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I want to get out.
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It's like that feeling of a kind of going out.
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I'm Charlie Brent Coast Cough,
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and after years of investigating Joy's case,
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I need to know what really happened to Joy.
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Binge all episodes of The Missing Sister,
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exclusively and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.
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Start your free trial of Wondery Plus on Spotify,
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Apple Podcasts, or in the Wondery app.
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In November 1974,
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IRA bombs ripped through two Birmingham pubs
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killing 21 innocent people.
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Hundreds more were injured.
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It was the worst attack on British soil
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since the Second World War.
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When a crime, this appalling and shocking happens,
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you want the police to act quickly.
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And boy did they.
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The very next day they had six men in custody.
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Confessions followed,
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and the men were sent down for life.
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Good riddance you might think,
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echoing the truth.
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Except those men were innocent.
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Join me, Matt Ford.
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And me, Alice Levine.
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For the latest series of British scandal
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all about The Birmingham Six.
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It's the story of how a terrible tragedy
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morphed into a travesty of justice,
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and how one man couldn't rest
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until he'd exposed the truth.
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Follow British scandal now
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wherever you listen to podcasts
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and binge entire series early
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and ad-free on Wondery Plus.
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Music
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I'm Simon Vosik-Levinson.
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I'm Rolling Stones' Deputy Music Editor.
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I work on all of our music coverage
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and I couldn't be more excited
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to talk about T for the Tiller Man today.
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Hey, I'm Angie. I'm a staff writer here at Rolling Stone.
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I previously reviewed
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YouSubs' re-recording of T for the Tiller Man.
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And I'm super excited to be on here.
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Was this album your official introduction?
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To YouSubs' Discography?
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For me, it definitely was.
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My mom was a huge
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Cat Stevens fan in the 1970s.
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So I really grew up with this album.
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I think I knew these songs even before.
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I knew who Cat Stevens
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where YouSubs' album was.
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Years later, you know, as a teenager
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when I discovered my parents' vinyl collection,
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I remember coming across the copy of this album
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with that iconic cover art
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and putting it on the turntable.
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And realizing that I knew, like, pretty much every song
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on this album by heart, just from here,
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or at the house, and, you know, having it sung to me as a baby.
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So this one's been with me since birth pretty much.
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Yeah, and same with my record collection.
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The first few records I even owned were
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T for the Tiller Man, teaser in the firecat.
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And weirdly, is it so from 77 with the YoYo,
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which is really underrated, but that's a very different podcast.
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And it was just getting into the art of album listening.
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And I really feel like Tiller Man is perfect for that.
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Did this album land on your personal ballots
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for the new 500 albums list?
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It absolutely did.
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My ballot could not have been complete without T for the Tiller Man.
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You know, like I said, this is an album that formed
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such an important part of the musical foundation for me, you know,
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before I even developed anything like taste in music.
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It's just sort of like part of the earth and the air and the stars.
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I put it at number 36 on my ballot,
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which now, you know, as we were,
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as I was getting ready for this roundtable,
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I feel like that might have been a little low.
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But it's definitely one of the greatest albums of all time for me, for sure.
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It was definitely an omission on my ballot by accident.
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But I feel like if I had to choose,
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I'm definitely partial to teaser of the firecat.
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Wow, controversial,
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you said I'm sorry, like Ruby Love and all of those songs are great.
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So something I loved learning about while researching this album is
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how much different you said's career looked before this album.
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And she how did his early albums and single sound?
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So he was really into pop music.
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I mean, in 1967, he released two different albums.
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And they had this like heavy orchestraal baroque pop.
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And it's definitely important to bring up that on Matthew and son, his debut,
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there's better bring another bottle with you baby.
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Here comes my baby.
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Baby gets your head screwed on.
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There's a lot of baby action.
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And I feel like that's kind of what his early stuff was at.
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It's fascinating really listening back to those early singles that he released before
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T for the Toer Man for me.
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They're fun. There's a lot of energy and, you know, charisma.
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But they're pretty generic sounding songs.
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There's not a lot that sets them apart from many other sort of pop singers
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in London in the 1960s.
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If you listen to those singles, I don't think you would have predicted what a kind of
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generational influential figure he was about to become.
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Being diagnosed with tuberculosis was a big part of his shift musically and spiritually.
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How did his illness affect him when he was diagnosed?
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It's important to remember that he was touring constantly and drinking every night doing multiple sets.
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His body was worn down.
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And I think this really forced him to put his life on pause.
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And within that pause, he was really reflecting on everything that he wanted.
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He was reading a ton of books.
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And I think he was really trying to re-evaluate who he was and what he wanted to say in his songs.
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As we can hear on this album in particular, he starts asking so many new questions about
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spiritual world and about life that he was starting to really look into for the first time.
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How can you hear then his music and what were the questions that he was beginning to ask?
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Well, I think as soon as you put Tee for the Tillermann on, you hear the kind of
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spiritual search that he was on at that time. It opens with a song that is in the form of a question.
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He asks where do the children play? He's looking around at the world around him.
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He's seen a fair amount of success, but there's something that's left him kind of
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dissatisfied wanting more.
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It feels kind of hollow and empty to him.
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He's looking for some sort of deeper meaning out of the modern world.
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That's a theme that continues throughout the whole album.
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Virtually every song on this album involves that kind of deep spiritual craving for something real,
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something meaningful, something that goes beyond the surface.
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And I think that's what gives this album such power.
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Tee for the Tillermann marked major commercial success for use.
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So Simon, why did a single like Wild World connect the way it did?
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Wild World is in many ways kind of like the ultimate Kets even song from this era.
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He sings with this kind of profound charismatic, you know,
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sort of howl from the soul.
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And he's, you know, in the song he's advising another character about what dangers there are out there
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in the world and what they should watch out for.
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Some people have taken issue with that over the years.
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And I think that's, you know, a fair, a fair point.
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But there's so much sort of deep profound longing and this tempest of emotions that comes through his performance on that song.
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And I think that's what really connected with people.
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As you brought up, there's been so much critique over the perspective of the lyrics and the critic Ellen Willis has seen it as misogynistic and condescending.
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Do you two feel like it's a fair critique of Wild World?
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You know, that essay by the great late Ellen Willis is one of the best pieces of music writing ever.
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Boom my mind when I first read it.
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I think it's certainly a fair critique they can make.
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To me as a fan when I listen to that song, what I hear is there's definitely a sort of patronizing condescending,
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talking down element of the song.
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To me, it sounds as much like he's talking to himself as to another character.
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He's kind of, he's warning about these dangers that are out there in the world.
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He's saying the world is a harsh place out there.
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It's going to chew you up, you know, things that seem like they're your friends aren't going to be there for you.
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He put that song in the sort of guise of advising maybe an ex or someone that he knows.
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But he's really talking to himself about the sort of these, you know, perils and dangers that he saw out there in the world that he was wrestling with himself.
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Yeah, and when I asked him about this, you know, he was open and said like this could definitely be interpreted that way.
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But it could easily also be a mother talking to her daughter when she's going off to college.
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And I really think it just reflects how distraught he was when his girlfriend left him.
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That's like when I hear when I hear it.
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I don't really think it was intention was to be misogynistic.
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The other thing about that song is like, even if you read it at its worst and you see it as sort of like this patronizing, you know, misogynist song.
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That's also real. He's expressing this kind of that is something that people say in relationships.
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That is a kind of dynamic that can occur.
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And he's one of the things I think is great about this whole album is that he's really bearing his soul on this album, including the less flattering parts of it.
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So if he comes across at times on this album as a kind of preachy or controlling-ish person with those tendencies, there's something that's real and kind of appealing about that in a kind of backward way.
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I love that this album and use of music is so formative for both of you as music listeners and Simon with your mom being such a huge fan and Angie having so many of his albums be the base of your record collection.
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What are some of the songs that are not only your favorites, but you feel like you've really grown up with or grown into loving as it's been with you over the years?
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I feel like where do the children play? It's not only my favorite like side one, track one ever, almost.
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It's really just a great melody and as I've gotten older, especially with the nightmare of last year and what's going on with the environment, it stays relevant throughout the time.
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And on more like a more personal note, I love into white a lot and I especially feel like as I don't live in a house made of barley rice, you know, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
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But I will say that I've been home a lot and cooking and really appreciating what it is to live in a home and that song especially has become very special to me.
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Yeah, I could name almost any song on this album is my favorite. I mean to me, Miles from Noir is kind of the quintessential song of this album where he kind of really lays out this kind of spiritually lost feeling this crossroads that he was at in its darkest terms. That's always really spoken to me.
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I'm also a big fan of hard-headed woman. That's an interesting song in the album where he kind of puts that same kind of search for meaning search for something real in the context of a relationship where he's looking for someone who can be his partner or someone who can be there with him through wife's ups and downs. That's that song is always a deal to me as well.
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Simon, have you played this album for your two sons?
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You bet I have. I've played this album around my house so many times for my kids. My goal is to make them, you know, as big fans as I was as a child and into adulthood and, you know, maybe in 20 or 30 years we can bring them back on a reunion episode of this podcast.
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Do they have any favorites already?
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I don't know if they haven't expressed any specific favorites, but they like this one. I mean, I think they also they love like the title track at the end of the album. That's kind of an appealing to a kid kind of song.
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You know, where he names all the different characters and, you know, which kinds of foods and drinks they're going to get. That's a favorite.
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I'm curious what else was happening in folk music if you can sort of set the scene of what the early 70s was sounding like and where was use of fitting into this?
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Right. So, you know, this album fits into a whole movement of singer-songwriter music that was happening in the early 1970s where people like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and Neil Young and, you know, so many other other artists were building this album.
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And then, you know, we're building on the kind of folk rock advances of the 1960s and going way more personal where so he wasn't the only person who was kind of wrestling with these inner questions in public.
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There's a certain sort of like clarity of purpose and clarity of focus for him that I think makes this album appeal.
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So, some of those other songwriters would write in more sort of ambiguous and, you know, more shades of gray, which makes their work incredible too and can be, can be amazing.
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But I think something that has appealed to people throughout the years about the way that he writes about these kind of big questions is that things have always been kind of black and white for him. He's always either saved or lost.
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And, you know, I think that's, that gives the album an appealing sense of clarity.
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Something that I also learned that I think is a really cool fact is that this album came out in November and all of a sudden, I think in February of 71 it enters the charts.
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And I read in an interview he did that intentionally like he didn't want to release a single yet for two months because James Taylor was on the charts with Sweet Baby James and Tumbleweed Connection by Elton John.
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And he was telling this journalist like, I think I should wait this out a little. And then of course two months later he does and it shoots up the charts, which I thought was really great.
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And the 70s were such a hot streak for you, so if you release several more albums before you convert to Islam and decide to abandon his career and live a devout life.
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Angie, what did the next couple of decades of his life look like before he returned to music?
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I mean, he really focused on his family and philanthropy. He really rejected the secular world in ways that did cause a lot of controversy.
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He also founded Muslim schools across London. He started the charity Small Kindness. He did release albums. It's worth noting in the 90s.
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And those contained a lot of Islamic themes. He taught Arabic al-Fabets a children. He was just so out of touch with pop culture.
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I think he said in one of our old interviews in Rolling Stone, he's like the last great record to me personally was Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, which was well before that happened.
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So it just goes to show like he was very far removed from everything.
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Yeah, I remember in the years when I was first learning about him and his career, it was still during that phase in which he had kind of left the pop world behind.
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And in a way that kind of added this air of mystery to the music, they were kind of like these dispatches from a lost world.
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And it adds a sense of drama to the music listening to it. Again, this is an album about a person who's on this kind of profound spiritual journey and knowing that he followed that journey to ultimately a very different kind of life than the one that he was leading when he made the album.
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That gives it a kind of dramatic edge.
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And what does life look like in more recent years, especially since the early 2000s?
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And I know with the 50th anniversary of T for the Tillermann, he was celebrating it and had even planned a tour before the pandemic if we can sort of encapsulate what the last, you know, more recent years have been for you, so.
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Well, I think 9-11 really affected him and his son had a guitar in the house and one night around the time in the early odds, he picked it up when everyone was sleeping and was just sobbing.
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And he really reconnected with what it meant to play again.
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And he also didn't want Muslims to be portrayed as violent on television, so he really started to get out there.
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I think he even sang Pestrain, Acapella on VH1, which was pretty awesome.
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And then yeah, throughout the years, he was releasing albums starting in 2006 and he described playing those old songs as putting on an old suit, so it was great for him.
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Yeah, I remember when he returned to performing these songs in public, performing new songs in the mid-2000s, the fact that that decision was made in part because of discussions that he'd had with his son.
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I loved that, you know, this song we haven't, we haven't talked about it yet, but one of the greatest songs in this album is the song Father and Son, where he examines these kind of complex generational dynamics.
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And there was something kind of beautiful about the fact that some of those same dynamics ultimately led him to reconcile with his older work.
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I remember a few years after that, even in 2016, I saw Yusuf play his first New York show in something like 40 years at the Beacon Theatre in New York.
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And I remember it was just, it was so powerful to see him revisiting these songs that he hadn't sung for so long, coming back to them, embracing them, finding a way to make them work with his new life.
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There was something really inspiring and beautiful about that.
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Simon, I'm actually surprised you didn't bring up Father and Son when talking about your sons, but we can let that pass.
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That one's a little too heavy to sing with young children. Now I think that's more correct when they start to rebel against me in about 10 years.
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So you check back. Yeah.
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For me, learning about Yusuf, Yusuf Islam and all of his music really came from movies and television shows.
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His music is so heavily featured in media. And I think for a lot of younger fans has been a major introduction to his catalog.
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Angie, what are some of the most memorable movies or shows where you've heard his songs?
spk_0
Well, I think first and foremost, the biggest example is Harold and Maud. It really matches the time he was writing these songs. He reached a much wider audience with it.
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And it became this really iconic way to experience Kat Stevens' music.
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And then much later with my own life, I mean, it's not a coincidence that the one song I really love, which is The Wind, is in both almost famous and Rushmore.
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And it's two really great scenes. For an almost famous, you have Penny Lane dancing in the empty auditorium to the song.
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And in Rushmore, I think it's Jason Swartzman who's flying a kite and The Wind starts to play.
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So I think it's really important to my taste and everyone else to get introduced that way. Just through the scenes become so much more emotional when his songs play.
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Finally, what impact has Yusuf had on not just the musicians who have followed him, but on his peers as well?
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Well, I think when you listen to this album now or when you listen to his re-recording of it, you really get a sense of what a landmark it is.
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I think you can really hear echoes of what Yusuf was doing in the 1970s in almost every kind of earnest searching, focusing, or songwriter out there now.
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There are connections you can make to so many people who are following in a path that he opened up.
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And even though it's fascinating to me that even though he followed that path up to a certain point, then left it behind and turned it in another direction,
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that torch was picked up by many artists in the subsequent decades. And that's something that's made this album still feel incredibly timeless now.
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I always remember you, you're a child girl.
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Cat Stevens T for the Tillermann ranks 205th on Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which can be found on our website, RollingStone.com and in the magazine's October issue.
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I'm Brittany Spanos. This is Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums.
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Executive producers are Christian Horde, Nathan Brackett, and Gus Winner.
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This episode was produced by Angie Martosio, Emre Seller, and me, mixed by Michelle Lans.
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Our senior producer is Jasmine Morris. Megan McBride is our production manager. Bridget Schelze is our production assistant, fact checking by Jonathan Bernstein.
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Supervised executives for Amazon Music are Raymond Roker and Morgan Jones. And for Rolling Stone, Jason Fine.
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You can find this podcast exclusively on Amazon Music, on the web, the mobile app, or on any echo device.
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To hear more music, check out Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums playlist, or the playlist Rediscover, Use of Cat Stevens, both on Amazon Music.
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You should remember you like a child girl.
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Catch a fill in for your sneaky link. Let's make sure it's the real deal first. Ready to bring toys into the bedroom?
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Let's talk about it. Consider this a non-judgment zone to ask your questions when it comes to sex, and modern dating, and relationships, friendships, situations, and everything in between.
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It's gonna be sexy, freaky, messy, and you'll just have to watch this show.
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So don't be shy. Join the conversation and head over to YouTube to watch Nick Cannon at night, or subscribe on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcast.
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