The Catalyst interview: Al Stewart

On a morning from a Bogart movie

In a country where they turn back time.

You go strolling through the crowd

Like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.

These are the opening lines to perhaps the most unlikely pop hit of the 20^th century – “Year of the Cat” by British folk artist Al Stewart, which reached the American Top Ten in 1977.

“Year of the Cat” and its similarly cinematic followup, “Time Passages,” are still mainstays of classic-rock radio, but anything else from Stewart’s extensive, deep discography, not so much.

According to Stewart, who’ll perform Sunday (Feb. 26) at the Capitol Theatre in Clearwater, the fact that those two songs – exemplary though they were – were big hits, that was a fluke. The Scotland-born singer/songwriter’s catalog, pre- and post-“Year of the Cat,” is wall-to-wall with lyrically dense yet beautifully melodic story-songs about people and places in history. Alongside poetic love songs and paeans to truth and beauty.

He is, first and foremost, a proud folkie.

St. Pete Catalyst: You once said “I think of songs like cinema.” Can you elaborate on that?

Al Stewart: I think there about five different things in the songs that you can look at, in the way that I write. And they’re all equally important. Most people who do popular music, ninety percent, what they’re looking for is a catchy hook. And they pretty much all think in terms of music, right? Music is probably twenty percent of what I’m interested in.

I’m equally interested in literature, so the words are super-important. And I’m interested in biographies. And, of course, in history. I’m interested in geography.

And I’m interested in cinema. I’ve probably watched at least one movie every single day of my adult life. There’s almost nothing I haven’t seen at this point!

So what I do is take all of these elements, I put them in a bucket and stir. And what results are these songs, which are really not like anyone else’s songs. I mean, Justin Bieber is never going to write “Roads to Moscow.” It’s just not gonna happen.

And thank goodness for that, by the way.

Well, there you go. But if you look at that, that song was based on a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which they made into a movie. Actually, it was a pretty good rendition of the original book.

You’ve got your minor key, so you’ve got your Slavic/Russian thing going on. Spanish guitar. So that’s the musical side. It’s a book, it’s a film and it’s historical! It’s all of the things that I just listed. It’s geographical too, obviously.

And that’s what I do. That’s how I write songs. And for some unknown reason, nobody else seems to be bothered to do it. So it fell to me to wave this particular flag, because it’s what I like.

By the time “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages” were hits in America, you’d been writing for a good long while. For a lot of people, especially over here, those songs define who you are as an artist. Are you OK with that?

Sure, sure. Why not? To get known for anything … this is a tricky business. Having people listen to anything you do is an honor. You don’t expect it. Well, I suppose if you have a really good pop talent and you write 50 hits, you know how do it and it becomes automatic, you set the drum machine at how many beats per minute, what’s the most commercial thing you can do … you plant a catchy hook and there it is. It’s plain sailing.

But I came up through the English folk scene. And we were the absolute opposite of that. None of us were trying to make hits, we were just trying to write the best possible song we could.

Why then was “Year of the Cat” such a massive hit? It’s a great record, sure – were you trying to write a hit?

No. It’s six and a half minutes long. And we put it as the last track on the album because I wanted to get it out of the way. So no one would have to listen to it.

I have lots of favorite tracks off that record. Probably “Flying Sorcery” is my favorite, because I think lyrically it’s the best-written.

With “Year of the Cat,” I didn’t know what I’d got. (Producer) Alan Parsons made me put a saxophone on it. Which I didn’t want. I told him “Look, saxophones don’t belong in folk rock. It’s a jazz instrument, come on! I’m not doing jazz – what are you talking about?” I said “You might as well have asked me to put bagpipes on the record.” He asked me to sleep on it. I did and I still didn’t like it.

I probably don’t like it to this day, but there it is on my record and everybody fell in love with it. I still don’t get it. I still think saxophones belong in jazz, but now I’m stuck with it. So there you have it.

When you’re riding high like that, do you think “Well, I’ve made it now – this is never going to end”? Or do you feel like you have to keep proving yourself?

After we’d done the saxophone song, I signed with Arista Records, and the only thing Clive Davis said to me was he wanted saxophones on at least one track on every record. I think we did four more with saxophones and eventually Clive dropped me off the label because I wasn’t having hits any more.

It was a relief. “Oh God, I don’t have to do that any more.” And I went back to being a folksinger again.

I never really got the point of it all. We had this hit all of a sudden. Folksingers are not supposed to have hits. It seemed to me that everybody was going to get one hit. Ralph McTell had “Streets of London.” Steve Forbert had “Romeo’s Tune.” Loudon Wainwright had “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”!

It just seemed inevitable. I think I’ve written 400 songs. Pretty much every folkie that I know has had at least one hit. That seems to be the way of the world if you just do it long enough.

You often tour with a full band, but in Clearwater you’re doing an acoustic show, with two other musicians. Is this like going back to the early folkie days?

There are advantages to both. I think when you have a full band you can reproduce the records the way that people heard them. And they like that. But the advantage of doing it acoustically is that you can hear every single word. And of course the words are very important to me.

Tickets for the Feb. 26 concert are here.