Taking care of my mother-in-law’s cat for the month while she is in France. She erratically howls in the night, wanting something but I don’t know what it is. She has food, the litter is emptied, she never allows being stroked. After a while, she stops and goes to sleep. I guess she just needed to ensure that between 1 and 4, I do not. While frustrated and waiting for her mood change, I returned to Tea For The Tillerman because I am fascinated with the make-up of the session, the colours of the sounds and their relationship to each other. I can hear their youth, their experimentation, confidence and what is unjaded about their time and place. I found a couple surprising facts. The first was that Yusef-Cat-Stevens released a remake three years ago. His voice ages beautifully, the upper register limited only a little when screaming the second half of Hard Headed Woman. I can’t think of anyone else who, over fifty years, has so much continuity in the colour of their voice, truly awesome. Also, amazing were the many bells and whistles of the depth and dimension of recording today vs. 1970. Every instrument is much deeper than the original recording and that is the problem. No magic here, at least not for me. Because of the “improved sounds”, it is like a zillion other contemporary records, whereas a spell was cast on the original. That’s why I’m here studying it again. Last night, the second amazing thing between wishing I had water pistol to shoot at the cat, was discovering the anniversary edition of Tea For The Tillerman which contains original demos of the famous songs. That is true gold, like when Doug McClement shared with me the original Stevie Wonder tracks to Superstition. Yusef-Cat-Stevens piano technique especially impressive on the demos and his twenty something excitement to convey his songs. In the Wild World demo he hasn’t yet answered “it’s hard to get by just upon a smile”. Just repeats the first statement twice. I am glad he did not settle for that, a real must hear, more so than AI generated photos of Vincent Van Gogh.