I had lots of little adventures throughout my songwriting career. I mean, it’s a skill, but somehow I always loved musicals, and so I was always able to write some kind of story in my songs and you can probably hear that even going back to the ’60s. And so you can see that from that point of view, he was projecting himself into the role and that becomes easier as a songwriter. But the son had heard about the revolution and he just couldn’t hold himself back, he wanted to join the march. One was the father who lived on the land, who was a peasant and his family had all grown up for generations on that land.
And so I had these two opposing kind of views. It had kind of a background of Nicholas and Alexander, and for that, as a songwriter, you enter into a whole new kind of world where you take on the characters that you’re singing and performing the song. Nigel Hawthorne and I got together to write this musical about the Russian Revolution. And I got together with a scriptwriter, actually, he was an actor, stroke scriptwriter called Nigel Hawthorne. But, and this is one of the interesting things, is when I came back to the house and started writing and writing, I had the idea of writing a musical. I suppose a lot of my development of myself and my music happened in that kind of period of convalescence after my illness. But more importantly, I’d just been through a very traumatic experience of contracting tuberculosis and being hospitalized, maybe only weeks away from death, so that also definitely spills on your consciousness and your understanding and knowledge of what life means when you’re trying to hold on to it. So you tend to advance in your experience without necessarily being so old. Y/CS: Well, let’s say living in the middle of the West End of London, this was the epicenter of life and nightlife, and I learned a lot growing up in that area. And recently two super deluxe editions celebrate the 50th anniversary releases of Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, boasting remastered versions of the album, new mixes of the songs, a bounty of alternate takes and demos alongside spellbinding live material, including a 1970 set taped at the legendary Troubadour club in Hollywood, California. Fifty years later, the artist has returned to his most famous work, issuing a newly recorded rendering, Tea for the Tillerman 2. The aforementioned Tea for the Tillerman was an extraordinary song cycle yielding classic evergreens “Where Do the Children Play,” “Wild World,” “Hard Headed Woman,” “Miles From Nowhere,” “Sad Lisa” and the title track, songs infused with spirituality and longing, a search for a higher power. By the turn of the ’70s, with albums Mona Bone Jakon and his timeless masterpiece, Tea for the Tillerman, Stevens’ music had taken a decidedly new turn, more intimate, more introspective, more spiritual, in alliance with kindred singer-songwriter material delivered by contemporaries James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judee Sill and Joni Mitchell, among others. He harbored deeper, much bigger questions than those that could find voice inside an innocuous two- to three-minute pop song.
In 1968, after surviving an almost deadly bout of tuberculosis, Cat Stevens, already a star in his homeland of England, having racked up the hits, “Matthew and Son,” “I Love My Dog” and “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun,” had grown weary of living life inside the bubble of fame.
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