Yusuf /Cat Stevens, one of the most influential singer-songwriters of all time, will release his highly anticipated new album, ‘The Laughing Apple’, on September 15 under his Cat-O-Log Records logo exclusively through Decca Records, the same label that launched his career 50 years ago. The Laughing Apple features original songs and covers, though the covers on this album are Yusufs own. He celebrates some of his earliest material, with new presentations of the songs. Conceptually, The Laughing Apple returns to the journey of the Tillerman, as he recalls his travels and life lessons to a younger generation. The album's cover features Yusufs own illustration, the first time he has designed one of his covers since 1972. Yusuf has drawn additional works of art for each of the 11 songs on The Laughing Apple.
Subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale," Numbers was a concept album relating to a faraway galaxy, a planet called Polygor, a palace, and its people, the Polygons. So one learned from the album's accompanying booklet
During his popular heyday in the 1970s, Cat Stevens did not release a live album, so it was some surprise that, nearly 30 years later, a live recording turned up on both DVD and CD. The performance captures Stevens on his 1976 American tour, just past his commercial peak…
Cat Stevens‘ Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman albums will both be reissued as extensive super deluxe edition box sets in December.
Even as a serious-minded singer/songwriter, Cat Stevens never stopped being a pop singer at heart, and with Teaser and the Firecat he reconciled his philosophical interests with his pop instincts. Basically, Teaser's songs came in two modes: gentle ballads that usually found Stevens and second guitarist Alun Davies playing delicate lines over sensitive love lyrics, and up-tempo numbers on which the guitarists strummed away and thundering drums played in stop-start rhythms…