‘Foreigner’: Cat Stevens Embraces His Soulful Side
The singer-songwriter’s 1973 album was an artistic reset, and featured his most ambitious work to date.
In the early 70s, the artist then known as Cat Stevens could do no wrong. After recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, a run of hit albums – 1970’s Mona Bone Jakon and Tea For The Tillerman, 1971’s Teaser And The Firecat, and 1972’s Catch Bull At Four – established him as one of the most successful singer-songwriters on the planet, selling millions and giving the world beloved songs such as “Wild World,” “Father And Son,” “Moonshadow,” “Peace Train,” and “Sitting.”
Catch Bull At Four spent three weeks at No 1 on the US Billboard 200, helped by an extensive North American tour, but with ever-increasing success came ever-increasing pressure. “I wasn’t really enjoying going onstage every night,” he told Circus magazine in 1973. “I got very paranoid and started to think I was drying up. I said, ‘What’s wrong with me? This wasn’t the reason I started…’ After leaving the States I sat down to ponder what I had been doing and I realized I’d been gradually getting into a very predictable state. I said I’ve got to stop this and introduce an element of shock.”
Order the remastered edition of Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ Foreigner now.
It was a point in his career where the singer-songwriter could have taken the easy – and lucrative – option of giving his growing fanbase more of the same. Instead, he followed his instinct, with new material inspired by the soulful sounds ruling the US airwaves. “The best stuff I was listening to at the time was black. It was during the end of the September US tour going from Los Angeles to New York. One thing I really got into was Stevie Wonder.”
He also fell hard for the lush, symphonic soul coming from Philadelphia, later describing how he felt listening to an album by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes for the first time: “It all started to seep in. Suddenly I realized that the whole of my musical upbringing had been dealing with black music. It was the stuff I had grown up on in England. In the very beginning I went through the whole blues thing – kind of like getting into black music through the back door. Leadbelly has always been one of my favorites. I realized that most of the time I had been naturally affected by black music.”
The revelation led to a reassessment of the sort of music he wanted to make and his place in the music world before recording what would become his seventh studio album, 1973’s Foreigner. “I had been pushed into acoustic things like James Taylor, Carole King, and Elton John. I took a look at the white music and said, ‘I’m part of all that.’ I felt kind of strange. I turned around and I was a foreigner to myself. I felt like that wasn’t me anymore. I don’t want to go on playing predictable me. I don’t want to act me, I want to be me, and I’m changing at the moment. And because I was a stranger in the world of black sounds, I called the album Foreigner.”
To make the music that felt true to him, drastic changes were necessary. He parted ways with Paul Samwell-Smith, the producer behind his early 70s hot streak, instead opting to produce Foreigner himself. He also decided not to call upon Alun Davies, the Welsh guitarist who’d been a vital part of his sound since Mona Bone Jakon, and Del Newman, the arranger responsible for the lush string parts on many of his most celebrated songs. In their place, he assembled a dream team of session players including bassist Herbie Flowers (David Bowie, Elton John, Lou Reed), drummer Bernard Purdie (Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Steely Dan), guitarist Phil Upchurch (Muddy Waters, Curtis Mayfield, Dizzy Gillespie), and crack horn section Tower Of Power (The Meters, Grateful Dead, Little Feat).
It was also time for a change of scene: Foreigner was recorded in Jamaica. In March 1973, he began three weeks of sessions at Kingston’s Dynamic Sounds studio, which had played host to some of reggae’s biggest names, including Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh. He might have told Rolling Stone in 1973 that he chose the island, “for sunshine. I couldn’t get it in England, and I didn’t want to go to America,” but in Jamaica he and sound engineer John Middleton worked 14-hour shifts, apparently only taking a single day off to swim and fish after friends forced him to take a break. “There’s no distraction whatsoever in this place,” he told NME. “No phones or people wanting to meet you tomorrow for this, that and a hundred and one other things. In this place everything’s done purely on a day-to-day work basis. You come in the studio feeling good and you get a good track down. If you don’t feel like that, then you don’t get a good track down. You’ll feel it after you’ve been here a couple of days – the atmosphere around this place is very alive and after a while it just rubs off on you.”
His songwriting was as bold as his decision making. The album began with “Foreigner Suite,” an 18-minute suite encompassing multiple songs stitched together in a dazzling feat of musicality. It begins in startling, post-modern fashion with a short section in which the listener is directly addressed: “There are no words I can use/Because the meaning still leaves for you to choose.” As he told Circus, “Here I am writing words that will be heard by millions of people and I realized how many various explanations there were going to be of this song. So I put a lecture in at the beginning.” Before long, a ragtime-inspired piano vamp introduces the next section, an infectious and optimistic tune originally called “Sunny Side Of The Road.” “It’s just my manner of being positive,” he explained. “Wherever you are, at any time, there is something good about it. Most of the time a lot of people go around being negative. If everybody thought about good things instead of bad, we’d be better off.”
After a seamless segue and blast of horn and synth, there’s an intricate jazz-funk instrumental passage that emphasizes the skill of the players before more rolling piano and cooed gospel vocals usher in a section we’ll call “Freedom Calling,” a rousing reminder of the ills of materialism which moves into a reggae-inspired mid-section and even flirts with prog. There follows a dramatic drop out for a reflective passage, seemingly designed as a plea to a lover in difficult times (“Won’t you give me your word that you won’t laugh/’Cos you’ve been a saving grace to me”) that gives the piece its emotional heart. The devotional theme continues throughout the next section (“Oh love, sweet blue love/No man can ever get enough”), a gorgeous, soulful ballad reminiscent of Sam Cooke’s ageless “Bring It On Home To Me,” and the final section, a brisk piano-led gem with hints of Tropicalia that resolves the suite beautifully.
“Foreigner Suite” took up the entire first side of the vinyl album and – thanks to its sheer ambition and quality – somewhat overshadowed the remaining four tracks of Foreigner. But there is buried treasure on side two. The US Top 40 hit “The Hurt” advocates for experiencing pain to truly appreciate life, set to a slinky groove. “How Many Times” is a soul-drenched, world-weary ballad, cut from the same cloth of Dan Penn and Chips Moman’s “The Dark End Of The Street” and Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” The album finishes with the lusty, symphonic funk of “Later” and groove-infused folk of “100 I Dream.”
Foreigner wasn’t written or recorded with commercial success in mind, but it still hit Top 10s around the world and reached No 3 in both the US and UK album charts – no mean feat for a record that starts with an 18-minute-long song. More importantly, it was the album he needed to make; a reset that put him back in control of his career while broadening his horizons. And Foreigner’s central message has become more apt with each passing year, as Yusuf Islam (the name Stevens has gone under since 1995) says himself in the press release for the 2024 remastered edition of the album, “We’re all foreigners. Say to an American or a European, that he’s a foreigner and he’ll say, ‘No, you’re the foreigner!’ But we’re all foreigners here, in a wider sense. We’re all looking for freedom and accommodation within humanity.”
Order the remastered edition of Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ Foreigner now.
