Customer Reviews

Year Of The Cat

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Anyone who has ever been entangled in the graceful arms of a woman from another country is enamored of this wistful anthem to the darkly sweet fragrance of mambo and that soft caress touched with danger not easily left behind. Perhaps Al Stewart's most accessible work, it captures the beauty of a woman in a poetry you can feel like a rain shower.

The Year of the Cat is so fraught with images described with an elegant lyricism it is almost as hypnotic and enticing as a rain soaked dress clinging to fluid beauty only seen through the eyes of love. The listener is simply carried along a perfumed scented river until finding themselves back where they started, longing to begin the journey again.

If the words are the vessel, then the music is the river it floats on, a piano and saxophone like currents rushing the listener towards a story of feminine intoxications. Stewart fills the tale with a wistfulness and understanding only time and distance from the heart's affair can afford. It turns the love story into a beautiful one only touched with melancholy rather than filled with sadness. It is for this reason the song is just as wonderful on a spring day or a winter's night.

There are only a handful of songs recorded during the modern rock era which so transcend their origins they become a universal refrain that will remain fresh and germane decades from the moment they debuted on radio. Al Stewart's Year of the Cat is such a song, and belongs on everyone's playlist.

It is amazing how a song so old can still sound so good, and I don't in any way mean that because of the quality of the recording, but rather because of the pure excellence of this song. It has everything that makes a song great, and it still lives on, and probably will for a very long time. This song is already a classic.

In the history of popular music, song artists crank out tunes faster than we can blink, or so it seems. The Beatles were probably the most prolific song writers of any generation. However, in the era between 1965 and 1979, the golden age of rock, along comes Al Stewart, a composer who had just signed with Columbia, to create one of the greatest singles of all time. It had everything in one song... haunting lyrics, lilting melody, great sax solo, great guitar solo, and wonderful string accompaniment. When Stewart finished the recording in the studio, he stated, "If that isn't a number one hit, I don't know what is." Thirty years later, I can catagorically state that "Year of the cat" isn't simply a number one hit; it is timeless, ageless, and one of the best popular songs ever written. Add it to your list.