Has Cat Stevens Changed His Name Again?

A unique feature of the destabilizing, horrifying Great Interruption of the past yr and a half (and counting) is that information technology has nudged then many of usa into a flow of protracted introspection and reassessment. Superficially, we've discovered the wonders of sourdough starter and urban gardening, but beneath the surface something more than significant has been going on. Especially during those long, pre-vaccine months of sheltering in place, it became somewhere between interesting and necessary to recalibrate, to inventory what we value, to wait at who and what nosotros surround ourselves with, and why.

Part of this process for me has involved a careful survey of what is literally on my shelves, which includes an ungainly collection of music housed on sometime media: vinyl, CDs and cassettes. I've deliberately reached for albums with which I take distant, uncertain relationships, producing new revelations. Heedlessly, I'd dismissed Randy Newman as a Hollywood lightweight, but a render to the sharp, subversive danger of his 1974 anthology "Good Onetime Boys," and the more than recent "Night Matter" from 2017, reminded me of his particular genius. The magnificent gospel compilation gear up "Farewell, Babylon" from 2003 bathed me once more in its heavenly glow every fourth dimension I put it on, making me wonder why I'd ever consigned it to mothballs. Similarly, both Sun Ra and the Shaggs found their way dorsum from the nether regions of my stacks and into regular rotation over again, each now making more sense than ever. And it had been too long since I'd spent time with Scott Joplin'south opera "Treemonisha"; the relevance of its poignant, resilient finale, "A Real Dull Drag," gave me goosebumps.

And so came Cat Stevens. I'd get-go heard Stevens'due south music as a teenager in the mid-'80s, when friends and I watched "Harold and Maude," Hal Ashby's paean to nonconformity. The film, which turned 50 this twelvemonth, prominently features Stevens's songs, including i that could be called its theme: "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out." I decided that I did. The very adjacent mean solar day I acquired a inexpensive guitar and began instruction myself how to play. Stevens'south songs eventually led me to Bob Dylan; Dylan led me to early on-20th-century blues, jazz and country music; and by my early 20s I was living in New Orleans, fronting my get-go band. A few years later, afterward I moved to Brooklyn, a series of chance encounters led to a loftier-contour date for my quartet. Critics wrote nice things virtually united states of america, nosotros began making records, and for the past couple of decades I've been blessed with a music career, albeit a nontraditional ane. Operating under the mainstream radar, I've headlined on stages ranging from the fancy (Lincoln Center) to the less and then (dank basements in rural Romania). If my path has never followed conventional patterns, just consider its source; in a real sense, I owe information technology all to Cat Stevens.

Stevens'due south route has been anything but a straight line. His career began in the late '60s as a teenage pop star in Britain, earlier a bout with tuberculosis near killed him. During his convalescence his songwriting morphed, and he emerged every bit the acoustic-guitar-wielding, long-haired Pan most people still conjure in their minds when they hear his name. He achieved superstardom with evergreen standards like "Morning Has Broken," "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train," and toured the world as a major headliner. Then, in 1978, Stevens suddenly renounced his music career, inverse his name to Yusuf Islam, auctioned off his instruments and rededicated his life to being a family unit man and a devout Muslim.

But he didn't entirely disappear. His new religious behavior led him in a number of directions. On the 1 manus, he donated time and coin to education and charity — and, while his interpretation of the religion he'd embraced suggested that playing musical instruments was forbidden, he lent his well-known voice to spoken word and children'due south albums that remain big sellers in the Muslim world. On the other hand, he became embroiled in the controversy surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie, leading many to dissociate themselves from his music.

Eventually, though, Stevens picked up a guitar and began writing songs again. In 2006, he returned to pop music under the name Yusuf, releasing the first of some tentative-sounding new recordings, but by 2022 he'd come up around to accepting his musical past in one case once more — at least halfway. Billing himself every bit Yusuf/Cat Stevens (the proper noun he currently uses; on Twitter, his bio says "Yusuf Islam the Artist also known every bit Cat Stevens"), he made an album with producer Rick Rubin, appeared at his Rock and Curl Hall of Fame induction, and embarked on his first American tour since the '70s. In concert, he began revisiting a broad sampling of his early work with a delivery and passion many of his fans never expected to see — myself included.

Now, he is reissuing his Cat Stevens catalogue. Last twelvemonth, he released gilded-anniversary box sets of what are arguably his artistic high-water marks, the albums "Mona Bone Jakon" and "Tea for the Tillerman," originally released within seven months of each other in 1970. This fall, 1971'south "Teaser and the Firecat" will get its own deluxe reissue, and there are plans afoot to follow it up with ceremony editions of each of Stevens'due south 1970s albums, sequentially (1978's "Dorsum to Globe" is the only 1 to be reissued out of social club, in 2019). He's too simply completed a typhoon of his autobiography. For devotees of Stevens's classic material, it can feel as though he'southward making amends for having walked abroad from his music all those years agone.

Merely is that actually off-white? Or true? Meditating on this during the pandemic fabricated me retrieve about what responsibility, if any, artists accept to their audience. If we agree that art has the power to reveal us to ourselves, to help us make sense of the world and our place in it, practise we then have the right to await artists to be faithful stewards of that human relationship? There may be no musician who prompts this question as straight equally Yusuf/Cat Stevens. And since Stevens now appears to be in legacy-tending mode, it seems advisable to wonder what exactly that legacy is — for me, for him, for us.

Yusuf/True cat Stevens with, from left, daughter Asmaa, his granddaughter, and married woman Fauzia in 2007, when he received an honorary degree for his humanitarian work at Uk's Academy of Exeter. (Anthony Devlin/PA Images/Getty Images)

In December, during the darkest winter many of us have always lived through, I began digging through the new box sets of "Mona Bone" and "Tillerman." Listening to those records again, and having recently turned 50 myself, a creeping realization began to take shape: that more than merely being professionally indebted to Stevens, I might actually not fifty-fifty exist the person I am today had I not been exposed to his music. Merely not just whatsoever of it. This music. These albums, from which the majority of the "Harold and Maude" soundtrack had been culled.

I suspect that this has to practice with the crucial developmental juncture I was at when I first encountered them, at that time in life when merely existing tin experience like one big, adolescent hurt. The globe stops making sense; the relationships we take with our families, friends and ourselves are constantly being dashed confronting the rocks. It'southward a time when many of us first grasp for the anchor of music and hold on for dearest life.

More than anything, Stevens'southward pair of 1970 albums are almost searching for actuality in a culture that does not assign great value to it. (For my high school yearbook quote, I'd chosen a lyric from a later song, "Drywood," that went: "Throw down your mask and be real." Old friends still tease me near it.) If the lyrics have a rebellious streak, it isn't ane with a political ax to grind, but a personal one. The questions Stevens asks are the consequence of objectively noting the decisions we're prompted to make equally individuals, and as a social club.

On songs like "I Retrieve I Run across the Calorie-free," "Miles From Nowhere" and "On the Road to Find Out," Stevens is trying to sort through what is real and what is not. On "Where Do the Children Play?" his Socratic questioning of the condition quo continues to be relevant:

Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air

But will you keep on building college

'Til there's no more room up there?

Will y'all make us laugh, will y'all make us cry?

Volition y'all tell the states when to live, volition you tell united states when to dice?

The recordings of these songs are full of feeling, full of seeking and longing. They express a kind of hopeful loneliness, what Victor Hugo called "the happiness of existence sad." Embedded in them too is that sense that initially resonated and then deeply with me: the promise of eventual and ecstatic release. This was the sensibility that, in my case, fueled spontaneous road trips in search of new experience, and epic bouts of music-making that eclipsed basic needs like food and rest. Stevens's songs supported these means of thinking and beingness, encouraging me to live as fully and freely equally possible.

On "Hard Headed Woman," "Wild World" and "Maybe You're Correct," Stevens offers variations on the themes of love and loss, over again yearning for something pure, faithful and sustained. His words may not reach the poetic heights achieved past Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, and they're not richly allusive like Dylan'southward, nor wryly resilient like Paul Simon'south. At that place'due south none of the detached absurd found in the songs of Bill Withers and Jackson Browne, nor the Tin can Pan Alley craftsmanship of Carole King and Harry Nilsson. What sets Stevens apart from his contemporaries is the way he is able to inhabit a space that exists smack in between earnest innocence and earned wisdom.

Nowhere is this improve exemplified than in the pièce de résistance of these records, "Begetter and Son." It's a song that, in the abstract, seems easy to dismiss as a trope of the early '70s vocaliser-songwriter era. Just listening to the original recording again has the power to fire off any sense of treacly nostalgia. In that location's a simplicity to the fashion the recording's various elements combine — the composition, the operation, the production — that is scenic, surprisingly soulful and nonetheless packs an emotional wallop.

Subsequently my reunion with those 2 1970 records, I listened to "Teaser" and its follow-upwardly, "Take hold of Balderdash at Iv" — and I had the sense that much of the artistic success of this particular clutch of albums had to do with the deft, understated bear on of the producer he collaborated with: the erstwhile Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. The chamber ensemble palette Samwell-Smith employed, consisting mainly of audio-visual guitars, piano, upright bass and hand percussion, and the refined arrangements he crafted, perfectly complement the interior landscapes that Stevens was exploring. Stevens had the pure, raw talent, certainly, simply information technology was Samwell-Smith who seemed to understand how best to transmute and position that talent for maximum artistic impact. These remain gorgeous records and deserve a place among the almost beautiful, satisfying pop albums of their day.

Simply after "Catch Balderdash" in 1972, Stevens's music devolved. He became a stylistic dilettante, venturing awkwardly into the realms of R&B, fusion, prog-rock and electronic music, and offering spiritual sample-platters — a little Buddhism hither, some astrology in that location, half-baked helpings of Taoism, numerology and Christianity. It was as though Stevens was trying on one outfit after another, mixing and matching in the hope that some combination would eventually work.

Null did, which may be one reason Stevens is rarely mentioned in the aforementioned jiff as some of those other prominent singer-songwriters from that era. When, in 1978, he abruptly withdrew from the music scene, he severed not only his human relationship with his career, only with the endless fans who however felt connected to his best music.

Billy Joel stopped releasing albums of new work in 1993, merely he didn't stop performing, or ask his tape company to stop selling his music, as True cat Stevens did at ane betoken later on he became Yusuf Islam. Stevens didn't but interruption upwardly with his fans; past denying the value of the music he'd made, he insulted our aesthetic sensibilities — and our judgment.

Stevens and singer-songwriter Dave Matthews at a Songwriters Hall of Fame dinner in 2022 in New York. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall of Fame)

"Artists owe nobody anything," the culture author Greil Marcus told me in no uncertain terms, in response to a prompt I sent him near artists' responsibilities to their audience. "People invest themselves in the artists they care about. … Only ultimately I think artists' followers have an obligation not to betray themselves through what Robert Christgau once named 'autohype.' That means convincing yourself that whoever'southward clearly inferior, fake, corrupt, stupid or just plainly slow piece of work is equally good as anything they ever did — that if one just looks hard plenty, the flowers of genius will flower."

Which is to say that it's a error to conflate artists with their work. When we elevate people to the kind of heroic pedestal that many, including me, put Stevens on, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. Artists are imperfect, similar all of united states, and bound to change. As Ruth Gordon's Maude says to Bud Cort's Harold in Ashby's motion-picture show: "Consistency is not really a man trait."

But what almost artists who stop sharing their gifts? Did Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison or J.D. Salinger deprive u.s.a. of something nosotros somehow deserved when they stopped publishing more work during their lifetimes? Is Elvis Presley'southward spellbinding 1968 "Comeback Special" damning prove that nosotros were cheated by his decision to dither away years of his talent making bad movies? Is Daniel Solar day-Lewis guilty of a cultural law-breaking for having walked away from acting?

Stevens stopped making popular music for almost iii decades, and now he'south come back. I wanted to bring upwards these problems with him directly, but I first had to be vetted by his handlers, one of whom is his son and managing director, Yoriyos Adamos. Then I was given a series of conditions: Yoriyos would also be on the telephone call with Stevens, which would exist limited to 45 minutes, and the Zoom session could be audio-simply, though this final restriction was lifted when I advocated for the importance of nonverbal advice.

A few days later, there Stevens was, on my screen, beaming in from his home in Dubai. Nosotros began our conversation talking about his early work. "The songs were better than I was," he told me. After the huge success he'd had with Samwell-Smith, he'd moved to Rio de Janeiro for a few years "to hide away … to empty myself, to escape. I was solitary, totally lone … like a true cat that you lot get too shut to," he told me, without any apparent irony.

And so nosotros got into his relationship with his audience. He now feels that he could have handled his exit from the music globe in 1978 more gracefully, and he told me that until recently he had simply a express understanding of the intense emotional attachment people all the same accept to his songs. This didn't sound like faux modesty; he seemed genuinely surprised past the fact that, during his recent return to touring, his old songs could provoke the kind of catharsis he witnessed from one show to the next. "I mean, I knew that there was a devoted listenership," he said, "but I just didn't realize how much people'due south lives changed equally the result of listening to my music." He acknowledged that his return to agile music-making has been driven in large role by the responsibleness he feels to share the artistic talents he'due south been given. And not just with some audiences, simply with everyone.

Stevens presented, convincingly, as a pretty regular guy, and I was awestruck to hear him talk well-nigh messing around with GarageBand at home, and about the steady diet of streaming content he and his wife take in at night. They'd recently screened the Due south Korean TV drama "The Empress Ki" and Ashby'due south "Being In that location" (both of which he loved), as well as "Game of Thrones" (which he didn't care for at all), and he admitted to existence a large fan of activeness films. ("I love to watch Tom Cruise jumping over the roofs," he told me.) He was easy to talk with, free of the kinds of defensive posturing I've seen him assume in other interviews. I think he was as surprised as I was when Yoriyos chimed in to announce that our time was up.

This was too bad. It felt like we had just gotten started, and I wasn't even halfway through my questions yet. When I later asked Yoriyos near the possibility of scheduling a follow-up, he was receptive to the idea.

From left, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sheryl Crow, Begetter Guido Sarducci, Stevens and Mavis Staples at One-act Central's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington in 2010. (Bit Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Making the argument for a second interview, I told Yoriyos — simply in case this was a concern — that I wasn't interested in talking most the Rushdie fatwa, and that it was non a focus of my piece. Stevens'southward position on that had been made articulate over the years in public statements, in his 2022 book, on a section of his website called "Editing Flooring Blues," and in a vocal past the same name. The topic, I thought, was likely to be a expressionless terminate. When asked, at a 2022 TED conference, whether he regretted how the Rushdie controversy played out, he raised his eyebrows and replied testily, "I regret the question."

Instead, what I really wanted to do was to become into a more than nuanced discussion with him almost how audiences and artists tend to the relationship they share, what happens when it breaks down, and what the procedure of repair looks like.

Yoriyos told me that his male parent was open to some other chat, but because of his schedule, I would have to be a flake patient. But equally ane month turned into two, and ii into four, and as I reported, researched and worked on drafts, I began to realize that in a story wrestling with what Stevens'due south piece of work meant to me — and what it might hateful to the wider world, given his career arc — it would be irresponsible to ignore the Rushdie episode, a topic that quickly arose in many conversations I was having about him, both with my editor and my sources.

Tracking the history of the controversy, I went dorsum to the 1989 advent that Stevens fabricated on the British Television evidence "Hypotheticals." Earlier that year, after Rushdie had officially been targeted because of his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses," Stevens had matter-of-factly confirmed that the Koran prescribes death equally the penalty for blasphemy. Now, on "Hypotheticals," Stevens was asked directly whether Rushdie deserved to die. "Yes, yes," he replied, without much hesitation. Were Rushdie, a marked man, to come up to him for aid, how would he respond? With what he subsequently insisted was nothing more an sick-advised attempt at dry humor, a straight-faced Stevens said: "I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is." When asked whether he would participate in the burning of an effigy of the writer, he replied that he would instead hope it were "the real affair."

When the programme aired, a furor ensued, compelling Stevens to consequence a press release indicating that his comments had been manipulated in the editing room and taken out of context (this, despite the fact that the New York Times reported that Stevens had "watched a preview of the program today and said in an interview that he stood past his comments"). But the damage had been done. Radio stations boycotted Stevens's music, and copies of his records were destroyed in public demonstrations.

"For many years, Yusuf Islam has been pretending he didn't say the things he said in 1989, when he enthusiastically supported the Iranian terrorist edict against me and others," Rushdie wrote to me in an electronic mail. "However, his words are on the record, in print interviews and on television set programs. … I'one thousand agape Cat Stevens got off the peace train a long fourth dimension ago."

Stevens has said he never agreed with the fatwa, and that he wishes people would simply "movement on" from this decades-old upshot. But the fatwa was not some historical footnote. In that location were bombings of bookstores; people associated with the book were killed or attacked.

I as well learned that the incident was non an isolated example of Stevens making public statements at odds with the gentle, liberal-minded nature of his music. In a 1987 advent at the University of Houston, he described the Jewish organized religion as "a baloney of monotheism," and questioned basic concepts of modern science, including the theory of evolution. In a 1993 lecture, he called those who would hurry to Rushdie's defense force hypocrites for giving America a pass for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In another appearance archived on YouTube (removed since the fourth dimension I began writing this slice), he defended the penalization of amputation for thievery, and in a 1997 interview with Andrew Anthony for the U.G. newspaper the Observer, he played down reports of deaths past stoning of cheating women in Afghanistan — arguing that this penalty has value as a deterrent.

It at present felt crucial to follow up again and to see whether Stevens might talk to me nearly Rushdie after all. In an e-mail, I told Yoriyos that what I had written had evolved in the ensuing months, and, given that, would Stevens want to comment on the lingering discrepancies between what he said dorsum then, and how he's characterized those remarks since? At that indicate Yoriyos made articulate his begetter wouldn't exist talking to me over again.

Stevens's publicist referred me to the FAQ section of his website, in which Stevens bemoans the way he has been written about in the press. Parts of the site bargain straight with Rushdie, with headings that read: "Did Cat Stevens Say, 'Impale Rushdie!'?" and "Yusuf Islam Wants to Come across Salman Rushdie Burnt, Right?" The site says: "I never chosen for the decease of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini — and still don't."

In the stop, my pandemic ruminations on Yusuf/Cat Stevens didn't issue in the type of clean, satisfying conclusion I'd hoped for, but thinking again about the motion-picture show that introduced me to his songs led to an thought I tin at least live with. In "Harold and Maude," a mentor appears to a young human being in distress. She helps him to stand up on his own ii feet and guides him forward. Then, unexpectedly, she departs, rupturing their relationship, merely leaving him a gift: the permission to be himself, to find his ain way. Somehow it's taken me all these years to realize that this could also describe my human relationship to Stevens.

One day, this awful time volition be behind us, and nosotros'll wait dorsum on the reckoning it inspired. We'll remember what it was similar to confront our choices, to enquire ourselves whether they proceed to have integrity and to be reminded that we're always free to brand new ones. The all-time songs of Cat Stevens would accept united states practice no less.

Stevens during a sound check before a performance in Los Angeles in 2009. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

Howard Fishman is a writer, composer and performer based in Brooklyn.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/09/20/yusufcat-stevens-reemerges-public-stage-how-should-we-feel-about-his-music-his-legacy/

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