Credit: Far Out / IMDB

Cat Stevens’ two favourite folk-rock albums

Sun 10 March 2024 21:30, UK

Folk music has never been meant to be the biggest genre in the world. Even though the industry side of the music business lives and dies on the number of records sold, it usually comes down to the number of people who can sing along to a folk song to see if it truly stands the test of time. While Cat Stevens may have had an eclectic upbringing in his household, his love of folk music came from listening to the sounds of artists like Bob Dylan.

Throughout his time learning how music worked, though, Stevens was never a snob about what went on the turntable. From one day to the next, the English songwriter could see the merit in classic pieces like Gustav Holtz’s The Planets just as much as he could appreciate artists like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

That’s probably why his grasp of melody is as strong as it is. Compared to the bluesy roots found in many British songwriters from the time, songs on albums like Tea for the Tillerman feel like they have been poured over by someone who internalised the finer details of harmony, including putting a few lifts in the track that would never be found on a Rolling Stones record.

While the British invasion may have been exciting fans in England a few months prior to landing in America, Bob Dylan was already making waves as the next answer to Woody Guthrie. Before he was called the voice of his generation and wrote the protest songs that still resonate today, Dylan was more concerned with making something that thousands of people could sing along to, sounding like a lonesome drifter half the time he sang.

Although The Freewheelin Bob Dylan was what got many people’s attention in 1963, Stevens’ favourite Dylan album came one album earlier on his debut. Seen wearing his trademark travelling cap, Dylan’s debut feels more in line with the young, naive Guthrie fanboy, talking about travelling on tracks like ‘Talkin’ New York’ and trying his hand at ‘The House of The Rising Sun’ before The Animals got their hands on it.

While Dylan would eventually make the leap into folk-rock in the late 1960s with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, his backing band on the road had their own ideas for their future. Leaving Dylan behind, The Band eventually worked on finding their own voice, beginning to move out of Dylan’s shadow on their debut, Music From Big Pink.

Since Dylan still had a ruling hand on their first album, The Band was where they solidified themselves as their own entity, working on tracks like ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ with the kind of Americana drawl that probably wasn’t suited for Dylan’s nasal approach to singing. For Stevens, The Band was more than just a typical folk-rock album. It was an education for how songwriting could be done.

Outside of their interpretations of singalongs like ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, the delivery from Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson showed him how to properly write songs, working the track down to the bone until it practically became second nature to them. Stevens would be no different, working away on songs like ‘Father and Son’ before being able to sing them as if he just came up with them in his favourite rocking chair.

Cat Stevens may have been welcome among the singer-songwriter crowd in his time, but when you listen to tracks like ‘Wild World’ and ‘Peace Train’, this isn’t just the James Taylor brand of songwriting. This was a way of making music a communal exercise, and Stevens may as well have been carrying on the tradition that Dylan and The Band had started.