Al Stewart

Those artists nobody seems to care about anymore. No one flaunts their t-shirts as a fetish, no one ever claims to have been inspired by them, no one obsessively follows their statements and tour announcements. Their records don't show up on "100 essential albums" lists, nor do they draw the fire of critics and musicians searching for an identity. Their mark on our collective musical memory seems entirely absent.

And yet, every so often, a song resurfaces on the radio, and right on cue comes the moment of realization: "Wait, I know this one, who was it again?"

And something stirs in the mind. You ask a friend, you jot down a couple of words so you can track down the lyrics later... Or, these days, you turn to your adopted technological deity, a tap on the smartphone and up pops the artist, the year, the title, the album.

A piano arpeggio, a circular riff that lodges itself in your head instantly, a groove that swells and turns jazzy... "Where have I heard this before? Come on, how can I not remember?" Phone, tap, a few seconds and the verdict arrives. Al Stewart, 1976, "Year Of The Cat". Same-titled album.

Success can play nasty tricks. Right when, at the peak of your career, you put your name on an instant hit, you seal your own fate. It won't matter what records you released before, nor their thoroughly deserved cult following; nor will it count for anything what you write afterward, however valid and fresh it may be: history will remember you as a one hit wonder, and your whole career will be reduced to a single, dazzling point. A piano arpeggio.

But the story of Al Stewart and his most iconic record doesn't let itself be boxed in so easily. Even if his name has, for whatever reason, ended up tucked away in some barely visible corner of rock history's shelves, it takes almost nothing — a flicker of curiosity sparked by a line or a solo — for that dusty box to reveal itself as a treasure chest, brimming with notes, words, images; ghosts of other eras that materialize before your eyes in an instant, more vivid than ever.

Songs as stories, tracks that conjure characters, settings, whole worlds. A refined and erudite songwriter, passionate about history and renowned since the early Seventies for the historiographic accuracy of his folk-rock ballads, Al Stewart draws on past, little-known events, bringing out both their peculiarities and the timeless elements of human behavior. In the tracks of "Year Of The Cat", however, music and lyrics strike a balance unlike anything on the six albums that preceded it: Stewart is tired of being an artist "for the few", and has ideas for giving his music a pop edge. He assembled a sizable cast of side musicians ready to back him, and — above all — had already identified, on the previous album, producer Alan Parsons as the ideal figure to give shape and life to the turn he was seeking.

"Lord Grenville", the first gem in the treasure chest, is still a historically-set folk ballad, dominated by strings and acoustic guitar. But it has a rare depth of sound, very different from his previous work, which projects it into an epic, timeless dimension. Thus the story of English admiral Sir Richard Grenville, caught off guard by the Spanish fleet off the Azores, becomes a metaphor for the passing of time. In the midst of a cryptic narrative, seen from the fragmented perspective of a sailor who escaped aboard another ship, an eternal worry surfaces, a doubt that echoes in the minds of men of every age: "Our time is just a point along a line/ That runs forever with no end/ I never thought that we would come to find/ Ourselves upon these rocks again".

Historical echoes also form the backbone of the album's second track, "On The Border". The narrative and musical style here, however, is something new: the historiographic references are vague, almost lost in the fog of time and synth — atmospheric, watery, pearlescent, a world away from the era's conventions and the true protagonist of the track's atmosphere. Fragments of setting emerge, hazy tales of arms smuggling on the Spanish border, navigation charts, voices carried on the wind of changes coming from Africa. But, announced by flamenco arpeggios and subliminal castanet clicks, the chorus arrives like a clearing sky: "In the village where I grew up/ Nothing seems the same/ Still you never see the change from day to day/ [...] / In the islands where I grew up/ Nothing seems the same/ It's just the patterns that remain an empty shell/ But there's a strangeness in the air you feel too well". The haziness of the historical allusions thus becomes a device to pave the way for the song's central message, the wonder at the eternal mystery of time, which changes everything without apparently changing anything, making what has by now completely shifted identity and function seem strangely familiar.

"On The Border" is a key track on "Year Of The Cat", a perfect synthesis of Al Stewart's highly metaphorical style and the visionary skill of Alan Parsons. But this meeting of folk-rock, exotic echoes and electronic brushstrokes wouldn't be so effective and evocative without the impeccable — and never intrusive — work of the rhythm section, led by that same Stuart Elliott whose versatility on drums graced both the dazzling discography of Cockney Rebel and the wistful "Una giornata uggiosa" by Italy's own Lucio Battisti.

Everything changes with the next track, "Midas Shadow", which leads into the album's central section. Here the shift in Stewart's style becomes sharp: historical references abandoned altogether, his pen now focuses on contemporary narrative sketches, drawn with irony, great verbal attention and extreme care for character psychology. Opened by a drizzly flourish of electric piano, "Midas Shadow" paints the portrait of a man in crisis, a once-successful investor whom fortune has turned its back on. Far from any depressive cliché, and shaped along lyrical lines reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, the song moves lightly and subtly melancholic between existential questions and verbal flourishes (nearly every line contains an English idiom), showcasing the author's originality and linguistic perfectionism.

"I have two small rules: don't use words that other people use, and don't write about subjects other people write about", the artist reportedly said in an interview. These two axioms sum up the sheer distinctiveness of Al Stewart's songwriting style, and while their validity is easy enough to demonstrate in historically-set, literary-leaning tracks, the results they produce when applied to pop-leaning songs are particularly interesting. "If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It", a sparkling piano-rock episode full of twists, treats the theme of "writer's block" with sardonic wit, without giving up wordplay or its folky soul. "Broadway Hotel" projects us into the cramped, refined world of a wealthy man who, out of fear of commitment, has chosen to make a hotel room his home. The classic structure of a folk ballad guides the listener through the regrets and contradictions of this solitary character, and the numerous musical flourishes (violin solos, mandolin passages, string beds and piano) lend the evoked scenario a Spanish-baroque grandiosity, masterfully underlining its hollow, disheartening nature.

As proof of his verbal meticulousness — which routinely led him to write "four completely different versions" of the lyrics for each single track — Stewart made the following statement about the sprightly "Sand In Your Shoes": "I made every possible effort to find an alternative to the line 'goodbye my lady of the Islands'. I churned out something like thirty other options, but I didn't like any of those either". If that track — pleasant as it is — turns out to be the most frivolous on the record, "Flying Sorcery" is instead a remarkable gem. Placed right at the start of side B of the album, it is in a way "out of place" within the overall logic guiding the track sequence. It is, in fact, another historically-themed folk-rock metaphor (a relationship between lovers read through the story of Amy Johnson, the first aviator to complete a solo flight from England to Australia), linked to the other tracks in the album's central section only by its distinctly pop attitude and by the substantial absence of melancholic traits — traits that are instead quite evident in the already-mentioned "Broadway Hotel", placed, not by chance, at the close of the central section.

With "One Stage Before", the reflection on time and the nostalgic character that guided "Lord Grenville" and "On The Border" once again become central elements. And once again central is the hand of Alan Parsons, who resurfaces to give shape to the track's allure. The founding theme is, so to speak, the snapshot of a feeling: a moment of déjà vu experienced by an actor on stage, and the resulting conviction of having already lived that same moment in other lives. The washed-out sound of the e-piano, underpinned by sturdy synth bass, carves out the track's deeply evocative atmosphere, and lends exceptional emotional impact to the closing solo, courtesy of guitarist Tim Renwick.

The alchemy of "One Stage Before" reveals what is perhaps the best-kept secret of "Year Of The Cat" (and, in truth, of its follow-up "Time Passages" too, also produced by Parsons): the surprising complementarity between the imaginative worlds of the songwriter and his producer. Parsons is visionary and science-fiction-minded – the mind behind the futuristic sonic tricks of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" and the musical reworkings of Asimov's "I, Robot" – while Stewart is introspective and enamoured of the past, yet both share an irrepressible passion for multiplicity. Both have devoted their art to creating elsewhens and elsewheres, other heres and other nows to roam through with imagination and reason. That's why the evocation of "other lives" the pair conjure in "One Stage Before" sounds so convincing and moving: because this is what the two of them have always done – and in some sense always will. They build worlds, populate them with lives and emotions, and then explore them in search of what they might reveal – by analogy or by contrast – about our own. The remarkable effectiveness of the Parsons-Stewart pairing is therefore a sign of something more than mere working synergy: a substantial alignment of horizons between historical narrative and speculative fiction that reaches well beyond the purely musical realm.

The album could easily have ended here. It would still have been a masterpiece, a turning point in Al Stewart's career, and a collection of near-perfect songs. But – deo gratias – it doesn't end there at all. Because one track is still missing: the evergreen, the title track, "Year Of The Cat".

Opening with that unforgettable piano riff (which earned pianist Peter Wood co-writing credit – and the resulting royalties), it's the longest track on the album, but without doubt the one with the most airplay – and for a song that, even in its single edit, runs close to five minutes, getting any airplay at all is already no small feat.

Lyrically, the song amounts to little more than a fortunate string of evocative words. There is, if you go looking for it, a fairly well-defined narrative frame: a member of a tour group is captivated by a woman with a passion for astrology during a trip through North Africa, and spends a night with her; when he wakes, the tour group has already left, and the man chooses to stay with the woman he has just met, even though he barely knows her. Yet the song's evocative power lies not in what the lyrics tell, but in a series of striking, largely disconnected images, perfectly slotted into the segmented vocal melody ("She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running / like a watercolor in the rain" at the start of the second verse, and the thoroughly enigmatic phrase "The Year Of The Cat", which alone serves as the chorus).

It's clear, however, that while in the other songs on the album the lyrics' narrative dimension carries at least as much weight as the music, on the closing track the balance shifts, and the words become an – essential, to be sure – accessory to the purely musical elements. What immediately strikes the ear, right after the rhythm section kicks in, is the sheer stylistic originality of the piece: a pop-folk-jazz hybrid in which bass and drums play a role every bit as decisive as that of acoustic guitar and piano. The harmonically rich chords laid down by guitarist Peter White (who, not coincidentally, would become the jazz-pop soul of Matt Bianco about a decade later) combine with the subtly funky bounce of bassist George Ford and drummer Stuart Elliott, here lighter and more impeccable than ever in his dosing of hi-hat hits and snare fills. Not content to simply settle into this novel, luminous, poised and subtly melancholic pop formula, the track unspools a string of unpredictable turns throughout its second half. In rapid succession come a bed of strings (courtesy of Peter White, soon to arrange another exceptional hit, Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush), an acoustic guitar solo (Peter White) that flows masterfully into an electric guitar one (Tim Renwick), followed by an unexpected saxophone phrase and, after the verse returns, a cascade of electric piano notes.

The track fades out, and with it ends an album that, like few others, embodies the many musical souls of the 1970s. The pursuit of stylistic hybridity, electronic experimentation, the revival of folk elements; the growing literary ambition of songwriters and the ever-greater importance of producers; the gradual fade out of the hippie era's eccentricities and ostentatious youthfulness, making way for a generation of refined songwriters, mature in their themes and masterly in their pop songwriting craft. Across the ocean, in 1977 Billy Joel would release what is perhaps the apotheosis of classy American soft rock: "The Stranger". In England, a year earlier, Scotsman Al Stewart had already distilled the British take on this new sensibility into a single masterpiece of an album. One that will keep on failing to earn t-shirts or a spot in any "Greatest Albums" list, yet stands as an emotionally singular window onto an artist and a musical era that, thirty years on, still refuse to stop amazing us.

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05/07/2015