The Laughing Apple

[M.]

Interview/ People

[Deleted]

Above link in full:

People.com

The Nine Lives of Cat Stevens: Yusuf Islam Embraces His Musical Past on The Laughing Apple.

By Jordan Runtagh

It’s not quite fair to call The Laughing Apple a comeback album. Since 2006, the artist who beguiled listeners in the ’70s as the spiritually curious Cat Stevens has released three discs under the mononym Yusuf—short for Yusuf Islam, his chosen moniker after adopting the Islamic faith in 1977. These works were his first foray into Western music after shunning the industry in the wake of his religious conversion, during which time he sold his guitars and focused instead on charity work and theological study. Fans were grateful for any new output following the decades of silence, but Yusuf’s initial trio of albums were a cautious, occasionally frosty reconciliation with the superstar he never truly wanted to be. On The Laughing Apple, he fully embraces his musical legacy at last. For any who’ve longed for the preternaturally wise acoustic troubadour of yore, the music envelopes like a hug from a long-lost friend—one who’s been away for quite a long time and has a lot to share.

Tellingly, the album is credited to “Yusuf/Cat Stevens,” marking the first time his famous alter ego has appeared on a new release since 1978’s Back to Earth. Much like the hybrid billing, The Laughing Apple builds a bridge between the old and new. The majority of its 11 tracks are rerecorded songs from his initial musical incarnation as a teenage pop star in the mid-’60s, including four titles taken from his 1967 sophomore album, New Masters. While these early offerings suffered from overwrought orchestration, the new versions feature stripped down arrangements reminiscent of his best-known material. That’s no accident; The Laughing Apple reunites Yusuf with producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitar foil Alun Davies, both of whom were regular collaborators during his ’70s heyday.

In a fitting nod to the 50th anniversary of his recording debut, he includes “Mighty Peace,” the first song he ever wrote. Few artists would dare put their very earliest compositions alongside their most recent, for fear of underscoring their crude creative beginnings. But Yusuf’s musical sophistication, to say nothing of his lyrical depth, has been present from the start. The song holds its own among contemporary tracks like “See What Love Did to Me,” and “Don’t Blame Them”—the latter of which urges listeners to exchange bigotry for empathy. It’s a potent message in a time of travel bans and increasingly violent protests.

Yusuf’s spiritual journey has made him a target of such blame. He converted to Islam on the eve of 1979’s Iranian Revolution, an event which transformed a matter of personal faith into an apparent political issue. Vaulted into the limelight as one of the most famous Muslims in the Western world, the singer/songwriter suddenly found himself as the unofficial spokesperson of a religion that most in his homeland knew nothing about. The role occasionally brought controversy, but over time Yusuf has evolved into one of the foremost ambassadors of peace on the planet. In addition to his philanthropy—including the founding of several dozen Muslim schools in the U.K.—the 69-year-old has returned to music to help spread his message.

Yusuf spoke with PEOPLE about his new album, peace efforts, how far he’s come and how far he has to go.

What was behind your decision to revisit some of your earlier songs?

I’ve got a bag full of songs I’ve been writing over the years—probably about 20 or 30—but when I started playing some of the early songs again with my guitar, I realized how badly they were recorded in the beginning. I thought I could right this wrong by going back in and recording them the way I feel it today. That, of course, brings a whole new life to the song. There were some gems in there, in my sixties albums, which I really had fun rerecording.

Has the meaning changed for you on any of these songs?

They’re still very relevant, like “Blackness of the Night.” You could have written that today about the refugee problem and about orphans left on the shores of a foreign country. They don’t quite know where they fit in and they’ve lost their homes and their families. That kind of song is still relevant. And then you’ve got “Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid),” which I think is very, very appropriate thinking about today. Even though it seems to be talking about the story of the gunslinger, it’s actually an anti-gun song. It’s the story of the sidekick who traveled with Billy the Kid and wanted to hang up his holster and go back home and live an ordinary life again without a threat of guns crowding his life. It’s quite an important song, I’d say.

When you first began writing songs, did you have a specific message you wanted to get across, or a goal in mind?

This [new] album gives very good insight into my original goal because it actually contains the first song I ever wrote, called “Mighty Peace.” The seeds of my dreams began with the dream of peace. In this environment, everything is clashing. You have to survive and drown out the noise. So I think that song lays out my path very clearly. But also, because I grew up in the middle of the West End, which is Theater Land here in London, I was influenced by narratives and musicals. I used to go an awful lot. Hair was playing up the road from us and I saw it so many times. Then around the corner there was Drury Lane with My Fair Lady. West Side Story was perhaps one of the most powerful for me. So I pitched narratives into my songs. They have a kind of beginning, middle and end—it’s a three-act thing.

As far as your writing process, do you hear the song completed in your head in one piece, or do you workshop it through?

I don’t plan what the song is going to be, but I like it to somehow surprise me. If I’m surprised and excited, then I’ve got a feeling whoever hears the song will be excited like I am. I trick myself as I start writing by haphazardly trying something different along the way. It might be a rhythm, it might be a chord, it might be a word. When that happens I know I’ve hit it and I’ve got something special. A lot of what we’re hearing today is quite repetitious. [laughs] Not all of it! Some of it is very original, and I’ve always looked out for the original.

On The Laughing Apple you began working with producer Paul Samwell-Smith for the first time in nearly 40 years. What was it like making music with him again?

It was great. He’s an artist in his own right. Obviously he’s got a great history with the beginning of British rock as the bassplayer in the Yardbirds. He’s got a great history himself, but as a producer he’s brilliant at understatement. The first time I understood that was when he played for me Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Joni Mitchell. That set the tone for what we wanted our records to sound like.

There was such a huge shift between your ’60s pop work like Matthew and Son and the sparse acoustic work to come in the early ’70s. Can you talk about that transition?

Initially, I was an artist who relied on other musicians to play my music because my producer set it up that way. That’s how it began and that’s how it continued for a long time until I finally got frustrated because I didn’t feel as though people were getting the songs as they should be getting them. And then came the opportunity when I got very sick. I was taken away and removed from the pop world and thrown in hospital. At that point, I had all the time in the world to gather my thoughts and find out what I was doing wrong. The main goal I set for myself was to take control of my own art and not to give it over to someone else to interpret. And that meant playing my own music—playing guitar, and learning to play almost every instrument that I wanted in order to capture the song that I heard in my head.

You mentioned “Mighty Peace,” one of your first songs, which is remarkable when you think how sophisticated the lyrics are. So many themes you’d touch on in your later work were already present this early. Who inspired you as a lyricist when you first started writing?

[Bob] Dylan obviously had a big effect, but if you look at the blues—the blues are all rooted in real life stories. When you listen to the catalog from Lead Belly, it’s a whole genre and a narrative of what people were going through on the ground in the most terrible situations. So there’s a realism which I started to try to capture in my lyrics, which weren’t to do with completing a lyric for the sake of the song. The lyric had to make sense and the story had to be told.

Looking at this album [The Laughing Apple], another song I really like is “Don’t Blame Them.” I borrowed the melody from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata. The theme of that song is extremely important because it deals with one of the great ailments, unfortunately, which has reared its head again: prejudice. It’s all to do with allowing others to think for you and not find the truth out for yourself.

You’re one of the foremost peace advocates in the world, but not everyone has the same audience and platform that you do. What do you believe to be the most important thing an individual can do to promote peace in this world in times like these?

I’ve thought about this, and you can consider the Peace Train as the symbol. We’d love to see a physical Peace Train arriving on our street and carrying us away into the land of happiness and peace and harmony, but that may not happen. One of the last tours I did was called Peace Train: Late Again. What I realized was that the Peace Train is a metaphor for one’s own life. We begin the journey with our parents and as we go along other people get on the train. We don’t quite know where we’re going to get off, but while we’re in this world, it’s our job to make our tracks as straight and as true as possible. I think even though the truth is hard sometimes, it’s a thing which will save you in the end.

insert quote here

[M.]

Yusuf/Cat Stevens Talks Revisiting 1960s Catalog for New Album

He's also already thinking about his next album. "I've got so many tracks in the can," he says. "I just haven't developed them enough. I'm waiting to find the right approach, but Paul and I just spent week at a studio in Stockholm, Sweden. We narrowed down quite a few tracks there. It just depends on what context I want to give to my next album."

[Deleted]

Above link in full:

Rollingstone.com

Yusuf/Cat Stevens Talks Revisiting 1960s Catalog for New Album. 'The Laughing Apple' features stripped-down versions of songs singer-songwriter wrote as struggling teenage musician.

By Andy Greene

Success came quickly for 18-year-old British singer-songwriter Steven Demetre Georgiou when he began releasing singles under the name Cat Stevens in 1966. His debut single "I Love My Dog" rose to Number 28 on the UK singles chart and follow-up single "Matthew and Son" hit Number Two. But it would be a long three years before Cat Stevens became a household name all over the world, a difficult period marked by overcooked recordings that didn't live up to the music in his mind. "It was all new to me and I had to leave the process of recording to the professionals," he tells Rolling Stone. "I wrote on acoustic guitar and they didn't sound like me. There were layers given to it that weren't mine. I felt alienated from my own music."

By the time that "Father and Son," "Wild World," "Moonshadow" and "Peace Train" hit radio in the early 1970s, this period of Stevens (who now uses the name Yusuf) became a distant memory. But a couple of years ago, Yusuf began going through his 1960s catalog and reflecting on what could have been. "I felt as if some of these songs deserve to be personalized, again, by me," he says. "I wanted to take ownership of them."

He decided to re-record 11 of them for his new album The Laughing Apple, which came out earlier this month. He recorded it in Brussels, Belgium with Paul Samwell-Smith, a founding member of the Yardbirds that also produced his classic 1970 LP Tea For The Tillerman. They reconnected in 2014 when he remixed Yusuf's LP Tell 'Em I'm Gone. "I wanted to work with someone I can trust," says Yusuf. "He captured the spirit of the songs at the very early stages of recording. We had whole museum's worth of analog instruments and could just pop down and choose whatever ones we wanted."

The songs were cut with minimal instrumentation, allowing them to breathe in ways they couldn't back in the 1960s. Guitarist Alun Davies, who recorded with Yusuf on many of his classic 1970s records and had been in his road band since 2006, also plays on the album. "Like Paul, it just seemed natural that Alun should be included," says Yusuf. "I thank God that he was since his natural personality and aura in the studio contributed so much. He didn't even have to play." For Yusuf, the entire process was a fascinating trip back to his earliest days. "It was like going into a trunk of your old toys," he says. "You pull them out and see whether or not these choo-choo trains still goes on the tracks."

Yusuf - who began playing his old music in 2006 after decades out of the pop music world - will promote The Laughing Apple with a long series of dates in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in November and December. He hopes to book more shows next year. "I was talking today about Asia," he says. "I haven't played Indonesia, China. I want to play places I've never played before." He toured America last year and hopes to return at some point. "I want to come back," he says. "I had such a great reception last time."

He's also already thinking about his next album. "I've got so many tracks in the can," he says. "I just haven't developed them enough. I'm waiting to find the right approach, but Paul and I just spent week at a studio in Stockholm, Sweden. We narrowed down quite a few tracks there. It just depends on what context I want to give to my next album."

[cristalina]

In a way I think it is a shame he is revisiting old tracks. I actually enjoy the old tracks the way they were and they sounded right for that period of time. Also I enjoyed Another Cup, (apart from Greenfields). I'm not in the slightest religious but one of my favourite tracks off that album is the Beloved and I think Yusuf is quite capable of producing more new songs going forward.

[crobarbie]

Well, I understand that he wanted to refresh a few songs from his old catalogue, and some of them sounds interesting... BUT this album doesn't have enough new material, such strong newer songs like "Welcome Home" or "I Was Raised in Babylon", or even "Belowed" etc. From 2009. he recorded no more than cca 10 new songs, and that is no good... in one of recent published review (2 of 5 stars) someone wrote thar it seems that today Yusuf has founded what he was searching for through his whole life and art, and that on "The Laughing Apple" he lost inspiration to give us something more, new and fresh. And this reviewer like Yusuf Cat, but was a little bit dissapointed with lacking of new material.

So, maybe that is the reason for album's failure on most of the charts, newer was so low placed in US, in UK after last week peak on No 23 it vanished from Top 100, only in German it entered in Top 10 (on 4).It seems that Yusuf's latest work became not so relevant as before, excluding his biggest fans... I would also like more to hear some new, more ambitious songs then looking for covers, which was predominant concept on last two albums. That does not mean that "The Laughing Apple" is not good album (I am giving 3 or max 3,5 stars of 5 or better 6 of 10) but I would like something new from Yusuf. Because only with new material you can stay relevant... and to be honest, his songs from that 60-ies era can't compare with his songs from the Mona, Tillerman, Teaser... albums... there are not close to them, he was younger then, probably few years too young to write such masterpieces as he wrote in 70-ies.

So, today there is too much of marketing and advertising connected to "The Laughing Apple", even Yusuf is gone to far with trying to present those early songs as the songs of similar relevance like his later works.

Ha, this kind of comment would be probably deleted from his facebbok fan page. Fortune to have this old place here. :-)

[Deleted]

People are raving about The Laughing Apple on the Steve Hoffman site, even comparing it to Tillerman:

forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/new-yusuf-islam-cat-stevens-album-the-laughing-apple-9-15-17.684550/

[cristalina]

I've just had a look at the Steve Hoffman site and it's good to see 😊 I haven't personally purchased Laughing Apple although I have listened to it, I haven't decided whether I may get it, although I do know that even if I own it, it probably wouldn't be my 1st choice when deciding what to listen to. Blackness of the Night for example is a brilliant song but it always was, I remember buying Cat's early singles for the 'b' sides when I was a teenager, I want to Live in a Wigwam was another great song from that era. Mona Bone Jakon just blew me away and when I saw Cat perform live in 1970, in a simple pub setting, it was perfection for me. I feel privileged to have seen him at such an early stage in his career, very few artists retain the simplicity of the early performance's. It is the nature of success.
I'd love to hear more new material and maybe some old fans enjoy revisiting old songs or even attract new fans, I'm not against it but for me I want something to rival songs such as Miles From Nowhere, Tuesdays Dead, I could go on but I've too many favourites 😁

[cristalina]

Oct 4, 2017 20:20:18 GMT -5 cristalina said:

[quote author="crobarbie" source="/post/74780/thread" timestamp="1506744741"
It seems that Yusuf's latest work became not so relevant as before, excluding his biggest fans... I would also like more to hear some new, more ambitious songs then looking for covers, which was predominant concept on last two albums. That does not mean that "The Laughing Apple" is not good album (I am giving 3 or max 3,5 stars of 5 or better 6 of 10) but I would like something new from Yusuf. Because only with new material you can stay relevant

Ha, this kind of comment would be probably deleted from his facebbok fan page. Fortune to have this old place here. :-)

[/quote]

Good to see your post wasn't deleted 😃 although forgive me for only quoting a section of it above 😊 You make a very good point when you say you need new material to stay relevant and I too am not really into covers. I know some artists can do good covers but I prefer the singer / songwriter, there's a depth to singing their own material that I like.

[Deleted]

Deluxe version of The Laughing Apple due January 2018:

www.ibs.it/laughing-apple-cd-generic-artists/e/0602557787498?utm_source=tradedoubler&utm_medium=affiliazione&utm_campaign=2101223&tduid=2703ba3a16c0cde453211e58ee3ae3c3

[Deleted]

I think the appeal of The Laughing Apple (oh I just got a tinge of a joke in my head there... "peel", "apple"), but where was I? Oh yeah, just from reading people's posts regarding the songs on the album, it seems that depending on when you became a fan of Yusuf/Cat Stevens you might have a preference for the way you first heard the songs way back when, or you find the new versions refreshing.

I really like the whole album except for the last song, "I'm So Sleepy", but I can see how it completes the whole. It's an album you could easily play for your young children or grandchildren and they'd be enchanted. By the time they get to the last song they'd just nod off to sleep, yeah.

There is a lot of subtle detail and lyrical tweaking in these songs such that I find it interesting to listen and compare the new to the old versions. I get a Father and Son feel when I listen to "Grandsons" for example. I always thought it was quite remarkable that at such a young age he composed "I've Got a Thing About Seeing my Grandson Grow Old", yet I can also see that after some years Yusuf might like to make some changes in the lyrics and such. A young man and an older man would perceive some of the lyrics more fitting to himself depending on his current age and situation. I got a kick out of hearing little things in the song like the clattering "Mona Bone Jakon" percussive sounds at the end of "Grandsons".

Anyway, when I first got the album I had it going on a loop in my car for about 3 weeks! I find it very enjoyable. I really love "Don't Blame Them" and found the change in style and tempo mid-song to be very true to Yusuf's sense of humanity and humor and I really loved that.

There's a Yusuf/Cat album for me any day of the week, and I suppose depending on my mood I'd have a lot of variety to choose from. He likes to change it up with regard to his album concept all the time, and that's cool.

[brandnewman]

The Laughing Apple has been nominated for a Grammy (Best Folk Album). It's about time.