will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Cat Stevens’ follow-up to his commercial breakthrough, a project with all-time folk-pop classics but whose most popular song was marred by a controversy surrounding its maker in the 1980s.
Few folk singer-songwriters of the era had a two-year period quite as prolific and successful as Cat Stevens had in 1970 and 1971. In April of the former, he put out, a supremely underrated album that featured one of Stevens’ greatest songs: “Trouble.” The LP charted in the UK, US and Australia and even went Platinum in Germany.
What a song like “Morning Has Broken” captures is Stevens’ ability to make non-secular music accessible to anyone who identifies with any spirituality. The song is a tome in that way, how it praises the art of singing and rejoices at the hope of a new day—rather than let its warmth skew in favor of one denominal pathway. Stevens approaches non-secular standards with a touch of modernity, as if he’s deconstructing the folk songbook and separating it piece by piece.