Tea For Tillerman – Yusuf/Cat Stevens [Audio CD]

Description

1. Where Do The Children Play? 2. Hard Headed Woman 3. Wild World 4. Sad Lisa 5. Miles From Nowhere 6. But I Might Die Tonight 7. Longer Boats 8. Into White 9. On The Road To Find Out 10. Father And Son 11. Tea For The Tillerman Cat Stevens tends to be lumped in with the early-1970s singer/songwriter school led by James Taylor and Carole King but he actually fits in rather neatly with such wistful contemporaries as Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and Donovan. Tea for the Tillerman’s “Wild World”, “Into White” and “Longer Boats” indicate that he may have been a more gifted tunesmith than the lot of them. As with the best of the Brit folk-rockers, Stevens mixed melancholy with whimsy. Yes, he was prone to airy platitudes but when he harnessed his eccentricities, as he did throughout this 1970’s masterwork, you had something truly distinctive. Stevens’ greatest drawback was that he was a natural cult artist,  la Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen. But that’s a tough role to play when you’re selling 25 million records, as Stevens did before he changed his name to Yusef Islam, established an Islamic school, and raised a ruckus by supporting Ayatollah Khomeini’s death decree against author Salman Rushdie. –Steven Stolder