Twee Magazine

Cat Stevens, "Mona Bone Jakon," 1970.

I have an article from the Washington DC Evening Star, dated August 15, 1970, in which Cat Stevens discusses a two-year disappearance from the public eye. He was hospitalized, specifically for tuberculosis, which had collapsed one of his lungs. "That was the result of pressures on my life then," he told the paper. "I was too hung up on what I was doing to worry about my health, and I just let it get to a head, and it got to a stage where another four weeks in the state I was in and I would have copped it."

Stevens has long described this as a transitional event: Trapped in a featureless hospital room, facing down his own mortality, he began to write new songs. Upon his release, he forced an end to his contract with Decca (Wikipedia claims he did so by pushing for increasingly expensive arrangements and recording sessions.) He signed with Island Records, which, thanks to having signed the Spencer Davis Group, had started to spotlight British folk talent, which was ideal for the folksier turn Stevens wanted in his music.

Stevens teamed with producer Paul Samwell-Smith, bassist for the Yardbirds, as well as arranger Del Newman, who would work with Stevens on six albums and whose influence on Stevens I think has been underestimated. In the Evening Star article, Stevens credits the classically trained Newman with shaping the final recordings. The songs on the resulting album, "Mona Bone Jakon," feature extremely limited instrumentation -- often just guitar, double bass, and piano. They are nonetheless exceptionally well arranged. With so few instruments, each part becomes its own character, and Newman's arrangements favor tasteful fingerpicking and bluesy guitar fills and piano parts that alternate between Tin Pan Alley-ish to pounding. 

The songs also make better use of Stevens' distinctive voice than his previous two albums had. Although Stevens was barely 21 when he made this album, he sounds much older thanks to a natural gruffness, and his songs send his voice through all its registers, from a deep growl to a frantic, high howl. Stevens will especially jump into his higher registers when his songs reach their emotional peak, and its the register in which Stevens sounds most like he's about to lose vocal control and just start tunelessly shrieking. He never does, but it gives the recordings an undeniable thrill. 

I start with the production because I suspect this is what first plucks what I will call the twee chord in listeners. There's an undeniable theatricality to the songs, with Stevens pulling from both his love of sobbing R&B and West End theater to produce songs that feel less intended for pop charts than movie soundtracks. In the Evening Star, Stevens admitted that his goal was to write for film, and its a goal he immediately fulfilled, with two of the songs from this album finding their way onto Hal Ashby 1971 twee classic "Harold and Maud." One of "Mona Bone Jakon's" standout tracks is "Trouble," a howling yawp of despair written directly in response to Stevens' illness, and it wound up being the song that plays over "Harold and Maud's" maudlin climax. It's a perfect match of music to screen action that many filmmakers would later try to duplicate, often using Stevens' music.

Lyrically, I think "Mona Bone Jakon" is less a break from Steven' past songwriting and more an elaboration on themes. Several of the songs detail a troubled, several-year-long relationship Stevens had with actress and model Patti D'Arbanville, who was then still a teenager (as was Stevens). It sounds like a typical teenage romance, and ended when D'Arbanville returned to New York for a month to work. She has told interviewers she knew the relationship was over when she heard the song Stevens wrote in response, "My Lady D'Arbanville." 

The song is perhaps the most theatrical on the album, with Spanish guitars behind a madrigal melody, and it sounds like the theme music to a meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism. In it, Stevens imagines D'Arbanville dead and in a coffin, which, since he wrote it about the same time he had consumption, is so Victorian I can barely stand it. At least one other song by Stevens was inspired by the breakup: "Wild World," off his next album, which, with its frantic guitar fills and punchy piano, couldn't be any clearer in its heartbreak, especially when Steven sings:

Now that I've lost everything to you
You say you wanna start something new
And it's breakin' my heart you're leavin'
Baby, I'm grievin'

It's a terrific song, and, since Stevens sounds much older than he is, suggests a more mature heartbreak than a teen romance would produce, as does "Maybe Your Right," from "MOna  This song, sung over a tinkling, almost ragtime piano piece and gently strummed guitar, starts off sensibly, with Stevens admitting to joint responsibility in the end of a relationship: "I put up with your lies like you put up with mine / But God knows we should have stopped somewhere."

But then, at the song's climax, soaring strings join the song, and Stevens' voice pitches upwards, the clarity of his lyrics breaking down to something approximating sobbing as he calls out, "It won't happen again. Never Never. Never. It'll never happen again." Like a lot of the songs on this album, this one ends with an unexpectedly ambiguous open chord, as though the song hadn't so much ended as it had just evaporated. 

Although Stevens occasionally touches on the mysticism he had previously experimented with (especially in "Katmandu," a song featuring flute playing from none other than Peter Gabriel, but sounding like sort of cod-Indian flute that appears in movies when something magical happens), for much of the album we find Stevens either heartbroken or sardonic: He offers a song called "Pop Star" in which he sounds like he were performing entirely in that "neener neener" voice children take on when they are teasing each other. The album's title song, "Mona Bone Jakon," an ode to Stevens' penis, is sung in a salacious, bluesy growl, like someone delivering a salacious joke. In fact, Stevens most overtly mystical song on the album, "I Think I See the Light," which sounds like the soundtrack to a religious conversion, is, in fact, a love song. "Sine, shine, shine," Stevens sings with a full chorus joining him, talking about a light that has given him supernatural vision, and the source of it turns out to be a girl who goes completely unsubscribed in the song.

The album ends with a series of songs that bleed into each other, like a miniature suite: A weird, discordant piece for guitar and voice called "Time," a love song called "Fill My Eyes" that is the most classically folky Stevens has done (with a chorus that sounds like a campfire song). Finally, there is "Lilywhite," which seems to share its guitar part with "Maybe Your Right," but tells of a woman who came, went, and will be back again, featuring a bowed bassline and what sounds like a full string quartet sawing away behind Stevens. Eventually, the strings take over completely, playing in a sort of fugue state, as though Stevens had been whisked away by a cloud and the strings were attempting to represent what it looked like.

Later in 1970, Stevens would put out a second album, "Tea for the Tillerman," and I actually feel this album and that would should be viewed as a matched set, with the later album acting as an elaboration on the one the preceded it.