Will Sing Out Magazine Ever Publish a Magazine Again

A unique characteristic of the destabilizing, horrifying Great Interruption of the by yr and a one-half (and counting) is that it has nudged so many of us into a period of protracted introspection and reassessment. Superficially, we've discovered the wonders of sourdough starter and urban gardening, simply beneath the surface something more significant has been going on. Especially during those long, pre-vaccine months of sheltering in place, it became somewhere between interesting and necessary to recalibrate, to inventory what we value, to look at who and what nosotros surround ourselves with, and why.

Part of this process for me has involved a careful survey of what is literally on my shelves, which includes an ungainly collection of music housed on old media: vinyl, CDs and cassettes. I've deliberately reached for albums with which I take distant, uncertain relationships, producing new revelations. Foolishly, I'd dismissed Randy Newman as a Hollywood lightweight, but a return to the precipitous, destructive danger of his 1974 album "Skilful Quondam Boys," and the more than recent "Nighttime Matter" from 2017, reminded me of his particular genius. The magnificent gospel compilation set up "Bye, Babylon" from 2003 bathed me once again in its heavenly glow every fourth dimension I put it on, making me wonder why I'd ever consigned it to mothballs. Similarly, both Dominicus Ra and the Shaggs institute their way back from the under regions of my stacks and into regular rotation in one case once more, each now making more sense than ever. And it had been as well long since I'd spent time with Scott Joplin's opera "Treemonisha"; the relevance of its poignant, resilient finale, "A Existent Wearisome Drag," gave me goosebumps.

And then came Cat Stevens. I'd starting time heard Stevens's music equally a teenager in the mid-'80s, when friends and I watched "Harold and Maude," Hal Ashby'southward paean to nonconformity. The film, which turned l this yr, prominently features Stevens's songs, including one that could exist called its theme: "If You Desire to Sing Out, Sing Out." I decided that I did. The very next day I acquired a cheap guitar and began instruction myself how to play. Stevens's songs eventually led me to Bob Dylan; Dylan led me to early-20th-century blues, jazz and country music; and by my early 20s I was living in New Orleans, fronting my showtime band. A few years later, afterwards I moved to Brooklyn, a series of chance encounters led to a high-profile engagement for my quartet. Critics wrote prissy things nigh united states of america, we began making records, and for the by couple of decades I've been blessed with a music career, albeit a nontraditional one. Operating under the mainstream radar, I've headlined on stages ranging from the fancy (Lincoln Center) to the less so (dank basements in rural Romania). If my path has never followed conventional patterns, just consider its source; in a real sense, I owe information technology all to Cat Stevens.

Stevens'southward road has been annihilation but a straight line. His career began in the tardily '60s as a teenage popular star in United kingdom, before a bout with tuberculosis nearly killed him. During his convalescence his songwriting morphed, and he emerged as the audio-visual-guitar-wielding, long-haired Pan virtually people still conjure in their minds when they hear his proper name. He accomplished superstardom with evergreen standards like "Forenoon Has Broken," "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train," and toured the world as a major headliner. And so, in 1978, Stevens suddenly renounced his music career, inverse his name to Yusuf Islam, auctioned off his instruments and rededicated his life to being a family man and a devout Muslim.

Only he didn't entirely disappear. His new religious beliefs led him in a number of directions. On the i hand, he donated fourth dimension and money to education and charity — and, while his interpretation of the organized religion he'd embraced suggested that playing musical instruments was forbidden, he lent his well-known voice to spoken word and children'southward albums that remain big sellers in the Muslim world. On the other paw, he became embroiled in the controversy surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie, leading many to dissociate themselves from his music.

Eventually, though, Stevens picked upwards a guitar and began writing songs over again. In 2006, he returned to pop music under the proper name Yusuf, releasing the first of some tentative-sounding new recordings, but by 2014 he'd come around to accepting his musical past once over again — at to the lowest degree halfway. Billing himself as Yusuf/Cat Stevens (the name he currently uses; on Twitter, his bio says "Yusuf Islam the Artist also known as True cat Stevens"), he made an album with producer Rick Rubin, appeared at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and embarked on his starting time American bout since the '70s. In concert, he began revisiting a broad sampling of his early on piece of work with a commitment and passion many of his fans never expected to see — myself included.

Now, he is reissuing his Cat Stevens catalogue. Concluding year, he released golden-ceremony box sets of what are arguably his creative high-water marks, the albums "Mona Bone Jakon" and "Tea for the Tillerman," originally released within vii months of each other in 1970. This fall, 1971's "Teaser and the Firecat" volition get its ain palatial reissue, and there are plans itinerant to follow it upwards with anniversary editions of each of Stevens's 1970s albums, sequentially (1978's "Back to Earth" is the only one to be reissued out of order, in 2019). He's also just completed a draft of his autobiography. For devotees of Stevens's classic textile, it can experience as though he's making apology for having walked away from his music all those years ago.

Simply is that really off-white? Or true? Meditating on this during the pandemic made me retrieve about what responsibility, if any, artists have to their audience. If nosotros agree that fine art has the power to reveal us to ourselves, to help us make sense of the world and our place in information technology, practise we then have the right to expect artists to be faithful stewards of that human relationship? There may be no musician who prompts this question as directly as Yusuf/True cat Stevens. And since Stevens now appears to be in legacy-tending mode, it seems appropriate to wonder what exactly that legacy is — for me, for him, for usa.

Yusuf/True cat Stevens with, from left, daughter Asmaa, his granddaughter, and wife Fauzia in 2007, when he received an honorary degree for his humanitarian work at Britain's University of Exeter. (Anthony Devlin/PA Images/Getty Images)

In December, during the darkest wintertime many of usa have ever lived through, I began earthworks through the new box sets of "Mona Bone" and "Tillerman." Listening to those records again, and having recently turned 50 myself, a creeping realization began to take shape: that more than just being professionally indebted to Stevens, I might actually non fifty-fifty be the person I am today had I not been exposed to his music. But not merely whatsoever of it. This music. These albums, from which the bulk of the "Harold and Maude" soundtrack had been culled.

I suspect that this has to do with the crucial developmental juncture I was at when I first encountered them, at that time in life when just existing tin feel like ane big, adolescent hurt. The globe stops making sense; the relationships we have with our families, friends and ourselves are constantly beingness dashed against the rocks. It'south a fourth dimension when many of us first grasp for the anchor of music and concur on for dear life.

More than anything, Stevens'due south pair of 1970 albums are well-nigh searching for authenticity in a civilization that does not assign great value to it. (For my high school yearbook quote, I'd called a lyric from a later on song, "Drywood," that went: "Throw down your mask and be real." Old friends still tease me about it.) If the lyrics have a rebellious streak, it isn't i with a political ax to grind, merely a personal ane. The questions Stevens asks are the result of objectively noting the decisions we're prompted to make as individuals, and as a social club.

On songs similar "I Call back I See the Calorie-free," "Miles From Nowhere" and "On the Road to Discover Out," Stevens is trying to sort through what is real and what is not. On "Where Do the Children Play?" his Socratic questioning of the condition quo continues to exist relevant:

Well you've croaky the heaven, scrapers fill the air

But will you go along on edifice higher

'Til there's no more room upwards there?

Will yous make u.s.a. laugh, volition you make us cry?

Will you tell u.s.a. when to live, will you tell u.s. when to die?

The recordings of these songs are full of feeling, total of seeking and longing. They limited a kind of hopeful loneliness, what Victor Hugo called "the happiness of being sad." Embedded in them likewise is that sense that initially resonated then deeply with me: the hope of eventual and ecstatic release. This was the sensibility that, in my example, fueled spontaneous road trips in search of new feel, and epic bouts of music-making that eclipsed basic needs like food and rest. Stevens's songs supported these ways of thinking and being, encouraging me to alive as fully and freely as possible.

On "Difficult Headed Woman," "Wild World" and "Maybe You're Right," Stevens offers variations on the themes of love and loss, again yearning for something pure, faithful and sustained. His words may not reach the poetic heights accomplished past Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, and they're non richly allusive like Dylan's, nor wryly resilient like Paul Simon's. There's none of the detached cool plant in the songs of Bill Withers and Jackson Browne, nor the Tin Pan Alley adroitness of Carole King and Harry Nilsson. What sets Stevens autonomously from his contemporaries is the way he is able to inhabit a space that exists smack in betwixt earnest innocence and earned wisdom.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the pièce de résistance of these records, "Father and Son." It's a song that, in the abstract, seems easy to dismiss as a trope of the early '70s singer-songwriter era. But listening to the original recording again has the power to burn off any sense of treacly nostalgia. There'south a simplicity to the style the recording's various elements combine — the composition, the performance, the production — that is breathtaking, surprisingly soulful and still packs an emotional wallop.

After my reunion with those two 1970 records, I listened to "Teaser" and its follow-up, "Catch Bull at Four" — and I had the sense that much of the artistic success of this item clutch of albums had to practise with the deft, understated touch on of the producer he collaborated with: the erstwhile Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. The bedroom ensemble palette Samwell-Smith employed, consisting mainly of acoustic guitars, piano, upright bass and hand percussion, and the refined arrangements he crafted, perfectly complement the interior landscapes that Stevens was exploring. Stevens had the pure, raw talent, certainly, but information technology was Samwell-Smith who seemed to understand how best to transmute and position that talent for maximum artistic touch. These remain gorgeous records and deserve a identify among the most beautiful, satisfying pop albums of their twenty-four hour period.

But after "Catch Bull" in 1972, Stevens'south music devolved. He became a stylistic dilettante, venturing awkwardly into the realms of R&B, fusion, prog-rock and electronic music, and offering spiritual sample-platters — a little Buddhism hither, some astrology at that place, one-half-baked helpings of Taoism, numerology and Christianity. Information technology was equally though Stevens was trying on i outfit subsequently another, mixing and matching in the hope that some combination would eventually work.

Nothing did, which may exist ane reason Stevens is rarely mentioned in the same breath equally some of those other prominent singer-songwriters from that era. When, in 1978, he abruptly withdrew from the music scene, he severed not but his relationship with his career, merely with the countless fans who still felt connected to his best music.

Billy Joel stopped releasing albums of new work in 1993, but he didn't stop performing, or ask his record company to stop selling his music, equally Cat Stevens did at one point after he became Yusuf Islam. Stevens didn't just pause up with his fans; by denying the value of the music he'd made, he insulted our aesthetic sensibilities — and our judgment.

Stevens and singer-songwriter Dave Matthews at a Songwriters Hall of Fame dinner in 2019 in New York. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall of Fame)

"Artists owe nobody annihilation," the civilization writer Greil Marcus told me in no uncertain terms, in response to a prompt I sent him about artists' responsibilities to their audience. "People invest themselves in the artists they care about. … But ultimately I think artists' followers take an obligation non to betray themselves through what Robert Christgau once named 'autohype.' That means convincing yourself that whoever's clearly junior, fake, corrupt, stupid or just apparently deadening work is every bit adept as anything they ever did — that if one only looks hard enough, the flowers of genius will blossom."

Which is to say that it's a mistake to conflate artists with their work. When we drag people to the kind of heroic pedestal that many, including me, put Stevens on, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. Artists are imperfect, like all of us, and bound to change. Every bit Ruth Gordon'southward Maude says to Bud Cort's Harold in Ashby'south film: "Consistency is non really a human trait."

But what about artists who stop sharing their gifts? Did Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison or J.D. Salinger deprive the states of something we somehow deserved when they stopped publishing more than work during their lifetimes? Is Elvis Presley'southward spellbinding 1968 "Improvement Special" damning prove that we were cheated by his decision to dither away years of his talent making bad movies? Is Daniel Solar day-Lewis guilty of a cultural criminal offense for having walked away from interim?

Stevens stopped making pop music for about 3 decades, and now he's come back. I wanted to bring up these issues with him directly, only I start had to exist vetted past his handlers, 1 of whom is his son and manager, Yoriyos Adamos. And so I was given a series of conditions: Yoriyos would also be on the telephone call with Stevens, which would exist limited to 45 minutes, and the Zoom session could exist sound-only, though this final restriction was lifted when I advocated for the importance of nonverbal communication.

A few days after, there Stevens was, on my screen, beaming in from his home in Dubai. We began our chat talking about his early work. "The songs were better than I was," he told me. After the huge success he'd had with Samwell-Smith, he'd moved to Rio de Janeiro for a few years "to hide away … to empty myself, to escape. I was lonely, totally alone … like a cat that you lot get also close to," he told me, without any apparent irony.

And so we got into his relationship with his audience. He now feels that he could have handled his exit from the music earth in 1978 more gracefully, and he told me that until recently he had only a limited understanding of the intense emotional attachment people still take to his songs. This didn't sound similar false modesty; he seemed genuinely surprised by the fact that, during his recent return to touring, his one-time songs could provoke the kind of catharsis he witnessed from one show to the next. "I mean, I knew that there was a devoted listenership," he said, "simply I only didn't realize how much people's lives inverse as the result of listening to my music." He acknowledged that his return to active music-making has been driven in large office by the responsibility he feels to share the artistic talents he's been given. And not just with some audiences, but with anybody.

Stevens presented, convincingly, as a pretty regular guy, and I was nonplussed to hear him talk well-nigh messing around with GarageBand at dwelling, and nigh the steady nutrition of streaming content he and his wife accept in at nighttime. They'd recently screened the South Korean TV drama "The Empress Ki" and Ashby'due south "Being There" (both of which he loved), besides as "Game of Thrones" (which he didn't care for at all), and he admitted to beingness a big fan of action films. ("I love to watch Tom Prowl jumping over the roofs," he told me.) He was piece of cake to talk with, gratis of the kinds of defensive posturing I've seen him presume in other interviews. I think he was as surprised every bit I was when Yoriyos chimed in to announce that our time was up.

This was too bad. It felt like we had only gotten started, and I wasn't even halfway through my questions even so. When I subsequently asked Yoriyos about the possibility of scheduling a follow-up, he was receptive to the idea.

From left, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sheryl Crow, Father Guido Sarducci, Stevens and Mavis Staples at Comedy Primal's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington in 2010. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Making the argument for a second interview, I told Yoriyos — but in case this was a concern — that I wasn't interested in talking about the Rushdie fatwa, and that it was not a focus of my slice. Stevens's position on that had been made clear over the years in public statements, in his 2014 book, on a department of his website chosen "Editing Floor Blues," and in a song past the same name. The topic, I thought, was likely to be a dead stop. When asked, at a 2017 TED conference, whether he regretted how the Rushdie controversy played out, he raised his eyebrows and replied testily, "I regret the question."

Instead, what I really wanted to do was to get into a more nuanced discussion with him well-nigh how audiences and artists tend to the human relationship they share, what happens when it breaks down, and what the process of repair looks similar.

Yoriyos told me that his father was open to another chat, merely considering of his schedule, I would accept to be a bit patient. Simply as one calendar month turned into two, and 2 into 4, and every bit I reported, researched and worked on drafts, I began to realize that in a story wrestling with what Stevens's piece of work meant to me — and what information technology might hateful to the wider world, given his career arc — it would be irresponsible to ignore the Rushdie episode, a topic that quickly arose in many conversations I was having nigh him, both with my editor and my sources.

Tracking the history of the controversy, I went back to the 1989 appearance that Stevens made on the British Idiot box show "Hypotheticals." Before that year, later on Rushdie had officially been targeted because of his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses," Stevens had affair-of-factly confirmed that the Koran prescribes death as the penalization for irreverence. At present, on "Hypotheticals," Stevens was asked directly whether Rushdie deserved to die. "Yeah, yes," he replied, without much hesitation. Were Rushdie, a marked man, to come to him for assist, how would he answer? With what he after insisted was nothing more than an ill-advised attempt at dry out humor, a directly-faced Stevens said: "I might band somebody who might do more than damage to him than he would similar. I'd effort to telephone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is." When asked whether he would participate in the burning of an effigy of the author, he replied that he would instead hope it were "the real thing."

When the programme aired, a furor ensued, compelling Stevens to issue a press release indicating that his comments had been manipulated in the editing room and taken out of context (this, despite the fact that the New York Times reported that Stevens had "watched a preview of the program today and said in an interview that he stood by his comments"). But the harm had been done. Radio stations boycotted Stevens's music, and copies of his records were destroyed in public demonstrations.

"For many years, Yusuf Islam has been pretending he didn't say the things he said in 1989, when he enthusiastically supported the Iranian terrorist edict against me and others," Rushdie wrote to me in an email. "However, his words are on the record, in impress interviews and on television programs. … I'm afraid Cat Stevens got off the peace train a long fourth dimension ago."

Stevens has said he never agreed with the fatwa, and that he wishes people would just "movement on" from this decades-quondam event. Just the fatwa was non some historical footnote. There were bombings of bookstores; people associated with the book were killed or attacked.

I also learned that the incident was not an isolated example of Stevens making public statements at odds with the gentle, liberal-minded nature of his music. In a 1987 advent at the University of Houston, he described the Jewish faith equally "a distortion of monotheism," and questioned basic concepts of modern science, including the theory of evolution. In a 1993 lecture, he called those who would hurry to Rushdie'due south defense hypocrites for giving America a pass for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In some other advent archived on YouTube (removed since the fourth dimension I began writing this piece), he defended the penalty of amputation for thievery, and in a 1997 interview with Andrew Anthony for the U.G. newspaper the Observer, he played downwards reports of deaths by stoning of adulterous women in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan — arguing that this penalty has value every bit a deterrent.

It at present felt crucial to follow up once more and to see whether Stevens might talk to me nigh Rushdie after all. In an email, I told Yoriyos that what I had written had evolved in the ensuing months, and, given that, would Stevens desire to comment on the lingering discrepancies between what he said back and then, and how he'south characterized those remarks since? At that betoken Yoriyos made clear his father wouldn't be talking to me again.

Stevens'south publicist referred me to the FAQ department of his website, in which Stevens bemoans the way he has been written most in the printing. Parts of the site deal directly with Rushdie, with headings that read: "Did Cat Stevens Say, 'Kill Rushdie!'?" and "Yusuf Islam Wants to Come across Salman Rushdie Burnt, Correct?" The site says: "I never chosen for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued past the Ayatollah Khomeini — and notwithstanding don't."

In the end, my pandemic ruminations on Yusuf/Cat Stevens didn't result in the type of make clean, satisfying determination I'd hoped for, but thinking once again about the film that introduced me to his songs led to an idea I can at least live with. In "Harold and Maude," a mentor appears to a immature man in distress. She helps him to stand on his own two feet and guides him forrard. And so, unexpectedly, she departs, rupturing their relationship, but leaving him a gift: the permission to be himself, to discover his own way. Somehow information technology's taken me all these years to realize that this could likewise describe my human relationship to Stevens.

One day, this awful time volition be backside us, and nosotros'll expect dorsum on the reckoning it inspired. We'll remember what information technology was like to confront our choices, to inquire ourselves whether they go along to have integrity and to be reminded that nosotros're e'er free to make new ones. The best songs of True cat Stevens would have u.s. do no less.

Stevens during a sound cheque before a performance in Los Angeles in 2009. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

Howard Fishman is a writer, composer and performer based in Brooklyn.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/09/20/yusufcat-stevens-reemerges-public-stage-how-should-we-feel-about-his-music-his-legacy/

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