Cat Stevens Tell 'em I'm Gone

The two-year interval covered in this volume of Time-Life Music's Singers & Songwriters series was one of consolidation for the many singer/songwriters who had emerged in the early '70s. Carole King followed up Tapestry, the album that established her as a performer after years as a songwriter, with Music, which spawned the hit "Sweet Seasons." James Taylor was on his second follow-up to his commercial breakthrough Sweet Baby James with One Man Dog, which produced "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight." His new wife Carly Simon released her third album, No Secrets, which gave Simon her biggest hit yet with "You're So Vain." John Denver, too, hit new sales peaks with Rocky Mountain High and its title single. And Cat Stevens had followed the success of Tea for the Tillerman with Teaser and the Firecat and its second single "Morning Has Broken." Meanwhile, several new singer/songwriters were crowding the field, among them Don McLean with the epic allegory "American Pie," America with its Neil Young sound-alike "A Horse With No Name," and Seals & Crofts with the lilting "Summer Breeze".

Last November in London, Cat Power took the stage at Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester FreeTrade Hall in May 1966—but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg—the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock-and-roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album CatPower Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.