ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘King of a Land,’ Yusuf/Cat Stevens Reigns Familiar Territory
Henry Carrigan
Posted On June 15, 2023
Perhaps there is some small comfort in knowing that musicians whose voices haunted your youth and whose songs drove your idealism are still making music that sounds like the music they made 50 years ago. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf/Cat Stevens) became — and remains — the soundtrack for many idealistic young, white men (now old white men) who fretfully and tearfully couldn’t mend the walls between them and their fathers (“Father and Son”) or who hoped for an end to the war (“Peace Train”) or who were enamored of Hal Ashby’s black comedy Harold and Maude and Bud Cort’s (Harold’s) journey to meaning “On the Road to Find Out.” King of a Land is for them.
The album opens with the lush, symphonic “Train on a Hill,” whose atmospheric strings and orchestral setting create a multilayered and melancholy update on “Peace Train.” In this new song, the train is stuck on a hill with chains on its wheels, and “there’s a peace in the air / but it’s headed nowhere.”
The title track sonically resembles “Moonshadow,” but lyrically declares what ideals the singer would enact if he were king of this world: “If I had a mountain of gold / I’d try to feed every soul / if I could reach every dream / I’d still search the unseen.”
The driving rocker “Pagan Run,” fueled by propulsive guitars and wailing B3, evokes the wild, out-of-control feeling when avarice takes hold. It’s hardly a celebration of a wild night, though, but rather a regretful, scolding moment about falling out of God’s grace into alienation. It’s no coincidence that the gentle acoustic ballad “He Is True” follows; it’s a somber reminder that after the raggedness of excess one can turn to the one who offers true love and grace no matter how far one has fallen.
Yusuf/Cat Stevens (photo by Aminah Yusuf)
The gospel-inflected “Highness” soars with an ethereal chorus of background vocals, while the tender “How Good It Feels” has a thematic resemblance to “Father and Son.” The new song plumbs the depths of feeling of love found and lost and found again: “I know what it’s like to be loved, to be loved … / I know what it’s like to be lost, to be lost … / I know what’s it’s like to be found.” The album closes with the jaunty doo-wop “Take the World Apart,” an optimistic singalong ditty about looking everywhere to find peace.
King of a Land contains no surprises, and fans of Yusuf/Cat Stevens will welcome an album that sounds like what they’ve come to expect. At its worst, its overproduced; at its best, the album is redundant. However, for many fans there is comfort in repetition.
Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ King of a Land is out June 16 via BMG/Dark Horse Records.
