Cat Stevens has gone through many musical and personal incarnations. His initial musical life was as a budding pop artist and songwriter during London’s Swinging Sixties. His big breakthrough, though, was when he recorded a series of four defining singer-songwriter albums from 1971 through 1974, led by the commercial and critically acclaimed Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat. Catch Bull at Four didn’t completely conclude this period, but with Foreigner, released in 1973 it was clear Stevens had a more varied musical palette than what he displayed on previous albums.
The fact that this album starts off with the nearly 19-minuite “Foreigner Suite,” which took up all of side one, indicated that this album was a clear breakaway from his previous singer-songwriter outings. The title concept partially came from the fact that Stevens was living as a tax exile in Brazil and not in England.
Recording at Dynamic Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, Stevens clearly absorbed the varied musical rhythms of the island and the beat became more important to his music than ever before. There’s a general island feel in the way various sounds are mixed together, most notable on the title track. Clearly, recording for Island Records at this time (in the UK) rubbed off on his music.
“The Hurt” was as close as the album came to a hit and received the most, mainly FM, airplay. This is music from an artist clearly digging even deeper within himself and also expanding his musical palette and number of collaborators, including primarily Canadian Jean Roussel, such session aces as Phil Upchurch, Herbie Flowers, and Bernard Purdie, along with the Tower of Power horns and singer Patti Austin.
With his next album, Buddha and the Chocolate Box, Stevens would return slightly to a more conventional album approach, yielding the hit “Oh Very Young,” then veer off again with the more unconventional concept album Numbers. Although his next, Izitso, included the hit “(Remember the Days of the) Old Schoolyard,” the album was poorly received as the singer-songwriter genre was being overshadowed by disco and punk. Back to Earth would be his last album before remerging in 1995 with The Life of the Last Prophet, with Stevens by then going by the name Yusuf Islam.
This 50th anniversary reissue includes the original cardboard, album-sized color ink art print by Stevens, was pressed in Germany and includes a limited-edition reworking of the cover in blue, replacing the original white cover.
This is an album not to be overlooked, as it may be the most underrated album from Stevens. Few artists today would experiment so boldly right at the zenith of their popular success, as Stevens did here. It is also a key, yet sometimes forgotten album at this important juncture in the history of the heyday of Island Records.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
