Cat Stevens - Sitting

Years ago, back when I got plenty of sleep and we waved to every car that passed the bus stop—those were the days of my parents’ record collections. Every couple weeks there’d be a new kidnapping, a CD hustled to the keep of my ugly boombox. I owned a fraying black set of Sony headphones that made me look a bit like a geeky offensive coordinator in need of a football team. For months I sifted through the sound; on my dad’s side, mostly Beatles. On my Mom’s, I made a token pass through the Moody Blues and Yes, but I was too callow for expositions and motifs. Instead, I got Cat Stevens albums from her.

The former Steven Demetre Georgiou stacked a career’s worth of singles upon laments for a decayed world, usually a poor theme for an artist seeking both career longevity and extended popularity. The liner notes to one of his best-ofs makes a non-judgmental note about his albums being a “staple” of teenage girls’ collections, and so it had been with my mother. I remember standing upstairs on the landing, listening as my parents enjoyed a dinner for two, making low conversation over Tea For the Tillerman. But even then, as happy as I was for my parents’ happiness, I couldn’t help but notice that the songs themselves were rather mournful. “Wild World,” “Sun C/79,” “Father and Son,” the maudlin “Where Do the Children Play”—all were portraits of people either trying to break from society, or deadened by a life of pleasure. Certainly he had his share of carryovers from the fading hippie days, but as a pop star with nagging guilts and aesthetic ambitions, Stevens tended to split the difference, keeping his songs of hope (”Longer Boats,” “(Remember the Days of the) Old Schoolyard”) separate from the jeremiads (”Child For a Day”). At his fey worst, whether happy or no, Mr. Stevens was in range of Chapin- or Jacks-like levels of affectation. But “Sitting,” man, “Sitting” was Stevens with the big lightbulb o’er.

Ever the underrated composer, Stevens constructed “Sitting” as a slow burn, beginning with a tinkling piano progression. “Oh, I’m on my way / I know I am,” he sings in a halting low register, and it seems like he’s shaping up for another, gruffer “Peace Train.” But then he snarls, “I don’t need to touch your face to know / I don’t need to use my eyes to see,” and, his pitch jumping up and a troupe of background Cats intoning with hollow “ah”s, he bruises seamlessly into the chorus: “I keep on wondering if I sleep too long / Will I always wake the same or so / And keep on wondering if I sleep too long / Will I even wake up again or something…”

I was terribly impressed. Here he was, finally cashing in on the promise of all his wan bitterness. Here he was, angry.

Those hollow voices chase him into the second verse, as he rues “bleeding half my soul in bad company,” offering the fatalistic promise that “I’m not making love to anyone’s wishes… ’cause when I’m dead and lowered low in my grave, that’s gonna be the only thing that’s left of me.” Then the second chorus, and he’s plain boiling. Studio mainstay Gerry Conway suddenly lashes out with a volley of sixteenths on the hi-hat and snare as his benevolent employer howls & hits a new peak of indifference. “And if I make it to the waterside / Will I even find me a boat… or… so? / And if I make it to the waterside / I’ll be sure to write you a note or something…”

The track ends on a Dylanesque note, comparing life to a million taunting doors, before Cat bitterly signs off, assuring that “try as you may, you’re gonna wind up where you started from.” A choked little howl, the piano repeats the end of the opening theme, and the song is over.

My brother, also tearing through those few CDs, latched onto the mystic romantics of the 18-minute “Foreigner Suite.” I had “Sitting,” and I drained the pleasure from it, setting it aside for years until I found a copy of The Very Best of Cat Stevens on my brother’s floor. At some point during my theft sessions I learned that Stevens had long since made a clean break from pop when he converted to Islam, devoting his life and most of his royalties (as Yusuf Islam) to UK Muslim schools and war recovery charities. And it helped, really, to realize that there hadn’t just been a set of skillfully posed questions, that Cat had finally gotten himself some sort of answer.

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