“For me, that makes it what it means today.” The sounds may have changed, but so has he.
“I wanted to do things that would help me to recapture a different aspect of that album,” he explains. “Wild World,” arguably the album’s best-known song, received the most extensive makeover, rearranged as a noirish waltz straight out of Weimar-era Berlin. “Miles from Nowhere” includes a buzz-saw slide guitar that’s positively rowdy - a word seldom used to describe Yusuf/Cat Stevens tracks, while “But I Might Die Tonight” is given a similarly hard driving treatment. The original calypso groove of “Longer Boats” morphs into a full-on funk breakdown, capped off with a spoken word verse from rapper Brother Ali. Rather than record a faithful replica of his masterwork, he radically recast many of the familiar tracks, exploring the sonic possibilities only hinted at in the acoustic originals. 18) finds Yusuf bringing half a century of experience to the words he wrote in his early 20s. Having teamed up with original producer Paul Samwell-Smith and co-guitarist Alun Davies, Tea for the Tillerman² (out Sept. Now he’s revisiting Tea for the Tillerman, the seminal 1970 album that made him a global artistic force. Then in 2006 he released the first in a series of four albums, marking a tentative reconciliation with both Western music and also his own legacy as a reluctant superstar. Taking the name Yusuf Islam, he sold his guitars and dedicated the next three decades to theological study and charity work. In 1977 he underwent his most famous reinvention by adopting the Islamic faith and rejecting the entertainment industry. Born Steven Georgiou in London’s West End, he fashioned himself into a teenage Swinging ‘60s pop idol before maturing into the folk-tinged spiritual seeker who beguiled fans in the ‘70s with musical dispatches from his metaphysical journey. Perhaps that’s because he’s gone through so many incarnations himself. Change is a recurring theme in the music of Cat Stevens.
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