Moonstone and The Laughing Apple of this Supa Dupa Life
Stevens music feels funny as the end of a school day but at the same time serious as a black board. The rythms twists and turns like cartoon figures around supernaturally beautiful themes. Stevens' voice makes the gown-up focus, an exciting contrast to his childlike music. The voice is angry, anxious, amused, rich of every emotion, though always soulful and serious.Therefore I don't take his many ironies as superficial irony, neither as destructive sarcasm, rather as the most honest way of expressing social life which is frustrating and confusing.
I love them all, those songs of Cat Stevens. Especially "I love them all" and the other tracks on "New Masters". This was his second album and is described as a too splitted version of his first masterpiece (both 1967, before a three year break). I don't see the split, I hear the same kind of unique, wide-eyed variation which every good record showed during that Sgt Pepper-era. Together with the bonus single sides and "Mathew & Son" the album could have been world's greatest double album. And with more voices and a more experimental mission, it would've been a forerunner to "White Album".
The overwhelming flora of instrumentation already grows there, a palette which Stevens later gave up and concentrated into more guitar-based folk music, and then broaded again out to his kind of jazz-soul-rock. Here in his 1967 things we are almost put in front of a symphony orchestra, trying to play something like a Prokofiev balette rather than a Mahler symphony. Anyway he chooses different instruments for each song, wanders from woodwinds to brass, along accordion to cello, through cembalo to xylofon, soon completed by other clocks and wooden blocks. Often these flexible surprises feels really funny, plays with the superficiality of "just too much", in perfect contrast to Stevens' serious soul.
I understand he didn't wanted to be just a pop star or manufacturer of schlager pearls. But all togehter I think these early attempts best captures Cat's urgent ground in magic storytelling. His drawings and lyrics suggests a love for carrols. Only on Numbers (1975) he seems to intentionally have found back to that fantasy road.
"The first cut is the deepest" - indeed! But my first impressions of Cat Stevens came quite late, when my life had passed 31. A female friend mentioned that other artist's songs I was giving her reminded of Stevens' songs. Then I went through his eleven main albums within some months. Until then I hadn't react on the few tracks I must have heard sometime. Now everyone was flashed in a new, old, fantastic light, like "a sparkle from a Moonstone".
Well, not immediately in love with every track was I, and still am not. Realised anyhow how Stevens had to be one of my very favourite songwriters. That Cat had a swedish mother and a greek father made the kinship feel even more strong. Some tracks I can't clearly remember even after the 19th time I heard them, but that I regard as a strength in his music. It contains such complexity parallell to the easy chewing gum-character of some songs. However I keep returning to Cat Stevens and he grows every time.
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