Twee Magazine

"Tea for the Tillerman," Cat Stevens, 1970.

"Tea for the Tillerman" is likely Cat Stevens' signature album. It contains a number of songs that were used on the "Harold and Maude" soundtrack (as did his previous album), but also "But I Might Die Tonight," which played over the opening and closing credits of "The Deep End." The short title song appeared in the closing credits of Ricky Gervais' television show "Extras." The album also represents a shift in focus from his previous album, "Mona Bone Jakon," which was dominated by songs about post-breakup heartbreak.

There is a song about the end of a romantic relationship on this album, "Wild World," which, like his previous songs, were inspired by his several-year-long, on-and-off relationship with actress and model Patti D'Arbanville. But instead of the confusion and betrayal expressed in previous songs, "Wild World" is almost sanguine about the end of the relationship, a caring adieu to a former lover who is about to head out on her own.

And that's the theme of much of this album, and a lot of Stevens' later works: partings, and the voyage that follows. Three other songs on this album address that theme. Firstly, there is "Miles from Nowhere," which presents life itself as a lonely, searching voyage, sung in escalating pitch over increasingly frantic acoustic guitars. There is "One the Road to Find Out," a cheerier, friendlier version of the same song, done as an almost childlike singsong. And there is "Father and Son," a soft-rock duet between Stevens, playing a somewhat melancholy older man saying farewell to his son, also played by Stevens (singing an octave higher), who is sure that he cannot learn about life except by experiencing it on his own.

Stevens makes use of this octave dueting in another song, the previously mentioned "But I Might Die Tonight." This is a countercultural anthem with a typically earwormy melody that starts with Stevens singing the song's title in a bluesy howl and then turns to an unhappy little piano driven melody that constantly descends, usually by two or three notes at a time. By the third verse, Stevens has joined himself, one octave atop another, an effect frequently employed by David Bowie and decidedly unsettling. There's not much to the song's lyrics -- Stevens merely rankles at the idea of getting a job he doesn't like -- but the melody, despite its simplicity, has a menace to it that explains its use in "The Deep End," a film in which tweeness turns into psychopathology.

"Tea for the Tillerman" represents an expansion on Stevens' previous album. I am tempted to say the arrangements are more ambitious, but I don't think that's the right word, as there are only six musicians credited on the album, including Stevens, and the songs remain tastefully under-produced, with an ear toward giving each instrument clear, distinct parts. But there is an emotive ambition here that wasn't as present on the previous album, with songs sometimes exploding into gospel style choruses, sounding ecstatic and visionary, and Stevens voice sometimes processed with an almost rockabilly echo and distortion, making his growl sound sinister. He relies on a string section for several of his songs, especially prominent in a piano ballad called "Sad Lisa." Strings can act as an artificial sweetener in the world of pop music, but the arrangement by Del Newman borrow from classical and folk sources and are genuinely exquisite.

The result is that Stevens doesn't merely seem like an adventurer, but a spiritual seeker, a pop version of the burgeoning new age movement, which is, I think, why he is sometimes shrugged off, his songs treated as lightweight and his pre-Muslim spirituality as shallow. This seems a little unfair to me -- despite Stevens' leanings toward folk, blues, tin pan alley, and world music (which appears on this album in a song called "Longer Boats," which borrows from West Indies' melodies), he is, first and foremost, a pop musician. Pop music is typically evocative rather than investigative, and must be, as the pop format is unavoidably limiting. There is only so much that can be expressed in a few minutes, and the best pop musicians gesture at larger themes, and return to them again and again, building a worldview over dozens of songs, rather than one. It is no more fair to say that Stevens' spirituality is shallow based on one song that it is to say that The Beatles' understanding of love is shallow based on "Eight Days a Week."

It is true that Stevens' spirituality here doesn't seem to be an expression of a specific religion, but instead something more general, with occasional Eastern influences, as well as influences from English folk culture, which I will detail in a moment. And that's fine -- Stevens' is not creating devotional music here, but instead creating a narrative of exploration, of young people setting out into a complicated and often difficult world. His characters, as in "Wild World" and "Father and Son," are young and inexperienced, and the older voices in the song seem sadly resigned to the idea that their journey will be a hard one. This is a more clear-eyed view of a metaphysical journey that Stevens is given credit for, especially knowing that he was in his early 20s when he wrote these songs, and so was closer to the callow naifs in the song than the wizened elders.

There are two songs on the album that I especially like, and are quite different than the others: "Into White" and the title song, "Tea for the Tillerman." Both are, it must be said, nonsensical, and I think deliberately so. The lyrics to the songs sound like a hodgepodge drawn from nursery rhymes. Into white, as an example, starts as follows:

I built my house from barley rice
Green pepper walls and water ice

 The song has a gentle, rolling quality, like a lullaby, and the whole of it sounds like the sorts of hypnagogic dreams that a hobbit might experience just before slipping into unconsciousness. "Tea for the Tillerman," in the meanwhile, is showboaty -- in a single sentence, Stevens runs his voice through its entire range, soaring to the cracking top end of his voice, with a hallelujah choir joining in for the final verse. It's an astonishing display, considering the complete lyrics to the song are as follows:

Bring tea for the tillerman, steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come
Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play
Oh Lord, how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day

A tillerman is someone who works a rudder post, on a boat or anything else that needs a tiller (early cars had them, firetrucks did as well), but it feels like the actual job of tillerman is irrelevant in this song. Stevens is singing about invented folk characters, and brings to mind the sort of seaside folk festivals that still happen in England, where costumed adults engage in strange ritual behavior for the entertainment of neighbors and children.

Stevens' journey are filled with mysteries, and they often take the form of these fictional folk and fairytale scenes. In fact, Stevens represented the tillerman on the cover of his album, an illustration he did himself: A burly man in a battered felt hat and fire-red beard, sipping tea in nature as children climb a nearby tree. It's a bucolic scene, but doesn't feel very far removed from the world of, say, "The Wicker Man," in which paganism had reclaimed part of the British Isles and expressed itself as a traditional May Day parade.

Stevens' world is wilder than his flaky, new age reputation gives him credit for. His youngsters are often found weeping, and it's unsurprising: I've seen a lot of what the world can do, he warns, and, further, a lot of nice things turn bad out there. The seekers in Stevens world are his heroes, undeniably, but they're heroes in part because there is a lot to find that will hurt them.

I shouldn't end this review without mentioning "Where Do the Children Play," the first song on the album and the closest thing to a protest song on it, which may be why it is written in a voice that sounds a little bit like a zonked out hippie. "Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes," Stevens sings, "or taking a ride on a cosmic train." The song creates an image of ever-spreading technological and economic progress that is crowding out any space for nature, much less humanity, and for a song that includes humming it is positively apocalyptic. It's also the first Stevens' song from this period of his life to explicitly address itself to the world of children, and is worth noting because this is a theme he would return to, with ongoing ambivalence.

He actually answers the song's question at the end of the album, in "Tea for the Tillerman," and in it children play in a strange, dreamlike, surreal folk fantasy. I don't know if the decision to bookend the album with these two songs, but it suggests that Stevens' solution to humanity's drive for a sort of progress that blots out nature and culture is a fraught, painful, sometimes lonely spiritual journey whose answers are ambiguous and sometimes nonsensical. That's an answer that has more in common with the romantic poets, Alice in Wonderland, and the psychedelic revolution of the 60s than the new age movement of the 70s.