1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 200. Cat Stevens – Tea For The Tillerman (1970)
I’m going to take a bit of a hiatus after this one, having reached the milestone of 200 albums, one fifth of the way through. I considered cutting it off after album 204 since that’s the last of the 1970 albums, but here is as good as any to get some energy back. This may or may not show itself in the publication of these since I’ve got a substantial buffer for the moment, but if there isn’t an entry tomorrow, you’ll know why. Not sure how long I’ll take. Until I get some things sorted out in real life and can do this without distracting from more useful stuff for a bit.
[Spoiler alert from future me editing this - normal service is continued tomorrow.]
I had a bit of trepidation approaching a
Cat Stevens album, since there’s something about his music that tends to leave
me cold, even though I also sort of like it at the same time. Perhaps it’s his
voice that sounds frail even when it’s not, or the habit some of his songs have
of being very stop-start while the music melody exactly matches the vocal (see
for example Matthew And Son, not on this album). These days, of course, he goes
by the name Yusuf (Arabic for Joseph, as anyone reading this has also read my
An Atheist Explores the Qur’an series will know, unlikely as that is to be.)
However, on, this album, he’s a lot more
bearable, and his best known tracks from this are also some of, in my opinion,
his musically better tracks – Wild World (covered by Maxi Priest) and Father
And Son (covered by Boyzone). There is something condescending in the lyrics to
both of those, perhaps unintentionally so, but the first is meant as a kind of
wistful farewell in a somewhat amicable break-up, but hopes that the woman
“finds a lot of nice things to wear” and worries that she’s too frail to make
it in the world, while Father And Son is not quite so egregious, but is a
similar tug-of-independence.
Other tracks, though, are less contentious.
Where Do The Children Play? is a polemic about urbanization and progress for
the sake of profit rather than human flourishing. Longer Boats is a calypso
that may be about slave raids (“longer boats are coming to win us, hold onto
the shore”) but maybe about freedom (“they’ll be taking the key from the door”)
– no idea, but it’s quite catchy.
All of Stevens’ songs on this album are of
the same kind of lo-fi mix, him with acoustic guitar and some other vocals and
instruments when needed (strings on the very folky Into White for example), not
quite as complex as Nick Drake and not as robust as Bert Jansch, a more
delicate take on the format and he did win me over on this album. I may not
rush back, but I didn’t also feel that love/hate tension that I normally do
with his music.
The final track (brought back into public notice by Ricky Gervais' Extras TV show) is a tiny little fragment. Who is "the Tillerman"? Are we talking the tiller of a ship, or somebody that tills the soil.
The lyrics are ambiguous:
Wine for the woman who made the rain come
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