By Gwen Orel

Al Stewart—yes, the “Year of the Cat” dude, as someone asked me (watch him perform it here)—speaks fast and uses his own lyrics for illustration. Now a resident of California, he began his career in swinging London—his press bio explains how he knew Yoko Ono until she found someone “with a bigger tape recorder”—as well as Andy Summers, Paul Simon, Ian Anderson. He has been writing storytelling, evocative lyrics for more than forty years. Sparks of Ancient Light came out in 2008, and this September, he’ll be releasing a new live CD.

And that’s the tip of the iceberg—as he explained to me, despite his emphasis on lyrics, he writes the music first, and most of the songs have several sets of lyrics to them. If we’re lucky, he might find the alternate lyrics to “Year of the Cat” and sing them—one version of it was about British comedian Tony Hancock.

He’s touring right now and plays New York city tonight, 8/21, at the Rubin museum’s Naked Soul series at 7 p.m.—completely acoustic.   Details of his tour are below.

His intelligent, often yearning and moody lyrics conjured in my mind an image of a sweet troubador—but his cleverness has barbs. His assumptions about the South (he used the phrase “the great unwashed” at one point), the differences between American and English tastes, and his own unqiueness—would be hilariously irritating if he himself weren’t so funny. And when he says “Sleepwalking,” a song from Sparks of Ancient Light that references a swindler from the “east 60s” and Florida, was not about Bernie Madoff but just prescient—it’s hard to disagree.

This summer is the 40-year anniversary of Woodstock, and there is (as there always is, let’s face it) a lot of nostalgia for the 60s floating about.  What does it mean for you?

I didn’t think Woodstock was as important as everyone else seems to think. Woodstock was a lot of noise in the field. In retrospect it was not very revolutionary nor in line with what interested me. Joni Mitchell watched it on television. Leonard Cohen was doing whatever he did; he wasn’t there. It was people playing guitars mouthing inanities and rolling around in the mud. It had very little to do with what I’m interested in.

I was part of the London folk scene.  America got all our rock bands, but none of our folk singers…it’s a strange thing… Bert Jansch didn’t translate at all.  He should have been a major figure on the American folk scene.  Richard Thompson… would probably not go on Jay Leno.  Americans did very well in England, but English folk singers didn’t do as well correspondingly.  It’s probably true that there’s a bigger folk reception in England in general.

Do you still see yourself as a folk musician?

I never did really. I came out of rock and roll. There’s a subtle word play there. I didn’t say I was a folk singer… I said I came out of the English folk scene. What was nice about that scene was that it was a very big tent. It included people who were unaccompanied singing, Norfolk farm hands, the Incredible String Band, psychedelic music… the English folk scene encompassed all of that and more. I’m a lyricist really. I puddle about and play guitar and sing; I’m basically a lyric writer.

Do you write poetry too?

I do but don’t bother to read it. I’m obsessed with the nonsense poets… more in the style of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. I’m not sure that goes over well here.

You seem to have some issues with Americans and their tastes.

I live in L.A. and like it. In terms of what’s accepted, some things just don’t translate. In America you have this huge monolithic thing called Country and Western, which is completely unintelligible to me. It has no meaning whatsoever in England. Country and Western it’s so big it’s blotted out what singer-songwriters do… it’s similar and yet the subjects are different. Country singers do story songs, which is what I do. Mine might be on the Russian front and World War II, theirs might be set in the local bar. It’s hard for singer-songwriters to prevail. American singer-songwriters do better in the Northeast.

I did a Southern tour; everyone told me not to. I thought there must be some people who read books in the South. I went all these places—Greenville… the Carolinas…deep in the South, Civil War turf. I sang a series of songs about American presidential history. I got absolutely nobody, and played to rows of empty seats. Although if I’d worn a hat and played a country song….

[here is where I mentioned the less densely populated nature of the South, the way promoters and concert series boil down to one or two people, how I myself ran a music series in the South.  Just so you know.  I'm a Jersey girl, but was an Alabamian for four years.]

When I knew I was going to interview you, I got two kinds of responses: enthusiasm and excitement from people in their late 40s and older (my brother’s been emailing me with thoughts, questions fotr the interview and links, for days) and “the Year of the Cat dude!”  Do you have different fan sets?

Yes. I call them the fans and the tourists. The tourists are the ones who heard “Year of the Cat” and made out in the back of a show to it. They know it as well as they know “Ring My Bell” or “Kung Fu Fighting” or “Disco Duck.” None of these people come to my shows; they’re just dimly aware of “Year of the Cat.”

People who come to the shows are people who know all of the songs. They don’t even want to hear “Year of the Cat.” “Roads to Moscow” is what they ask for—that’s a different thing.

So does that mean you won’t play “Year of the Cat?”

I probably will, but it’s candy fluff. It wasn’t even my favorite album.

What is your favorite album?

Past Present and Future is a much better album, it’s better written. What I do and what I’ve always done are these historical songs. I thought forty years ago, I looked around, if you look at the history of all the artistic endeavors of the human race, most of them, history is a dominant feature. Literature, movies— like The Titanic—all the greatest paintings are historical, sculpture, art—in ever form of art that I could find, the dominent content was historical. I thought if I applied to popular music, I would be Elvis Presley.

Now I have to admit defeat.

I chose the only medium that I could where history was not the dominant factor, and in fact something people didn’t want to hear about. There’s a crazed hardcore who like me think that historical songs are the bees knees. It’s a tiny minority—I expected it to be a huge majority. It would have changed my life if I’d been right. I thought it was a slam dunk.

I thought after “Roads to Moscow” all these historical songs would be in the top ten, but I can’t even get them played on the radio. You talk to a disc jockey and say “I’ve written a song about the fall of Constantinople” and their eyes glaze over.

If I made a movie about the fall of Constantinople and put stupid Brad Pitt in it, it would be a hit. It’s only in popular music that it’s not taken off. This means one of two things, either I am right except I’m ahead of my time, and somebody will do this in fifty years time and they will be the next Elvis, or I’m completely wrong, or, there’s a third possibility, I’m right but just not doing it well enough. At this point I’ll accept any of those possibilities. The premise made so much sense to me, but something in the execution didn’t follow through. I don’t even think it has to do with the population base.

You hit bottlenecks where you have to funnel through the media. I think there is an audience outside of the basic, everyday human concerns that will look at a larger picture of how we got here and why. It’s a hard sell, an impossible sell in Alabama.

For me, the songs that become my favorite songs have a lot of emotion in them that I can relate to.  They don’t have to be personal songs, but they have to have an emotion in them that I can latch onto.  That’s what I require.

That’s what everybody requires. That I think is the problem. I tend to… not erase emotion in songs, but it’s an entirely overdone thing. The saber-toothed tiger was a very emotional creature; it was also stupid and died out. I would prefer something to be cleverer, less aggressive… I like my music like that. I understand that Metallica are terrific at what they do but it’s not what I want to listen to.

Is there no middle ground between you and Metallica?

Oh, sure there is. I’m fairly broad-minded in my tastes.

For example, on your latest CD I like the song “Football Hero,”  but I don’t care about the person in the song or about football, but I can relate to the emotion and the frustration.

I don’t care about football either, in fact I’m astonished I wrote that song because I care zero about football.

That is my response to most story songs in general.  The story can be really fascinating but if I can’t find a way to apply it to some emotion that I have or will have, I probably won’t listen to it very often.

I think that you’re in the majority. I don’t think it affects me in that way. I’m always looking at cross-connections that are under the surface. There is an emotion, I’m not denying the emotion, but there has to be an intellectuality at work as well as the emotion. If I read a book about Rupert Brooke for example, he’s a poet, it’s emotional because he dies in 1915 on his way to the Dardanelles campaign, OK, we know he’s going to die, we know he’s having an unrequited with Violet Asquith at the time, so you’re set up for an emotional payoff on that. But when I put them into my song “Somewhere in England 1915″ the song is not about them, they’re merely transient characters wandering through one verse, they’re used as the set up for the mood of the song, and not for the emotional payoff.

If I was writing the song for you, I wouldn’t go anywhere else in the song, I’d just concentrate on Rupert Brooke and Violet Asquith and make it as emotional as all get go. But to me that’s not terribly interesting. Does that make any sense to you?

I’m not sure I see the distinction between emotion and mood.  There are—not many, I agree with you—but there are some songs that are story based or historically based that have been successful.

“American Pie,” for example, lots of people love that who weren’t alive when Buddy Holly died, but you get the feeling of yearning in it, the mood of it comes across.

I don’t think it should be completely unemotional, I just don’t think it should be tawdry. Some emotions are terribly cheap, and what you’re doing is manipulating an audience in a way. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any Charles Bronson movies—you know the baddie is going to get shot in the end, you sit there for 90 minutes—you’re just being manipulated. What I’m trying to do is write non-manipulative songs. If there’s an emotional pull, it should come from the gravitas of the situation, rather than some false juggling going on on the part of the writer.

Would you say that your earlier songs were more personal?

My first four albums were just love songs, they’re neither here nor there, I was just trying to learn the trade.

What accounted for the evolution?

Well, I wrote love songs. Once you’ve done it, you’ve done it. Everyone else has done it. One was 18 minutes long! I did it, enough! My personal credo is play like Eddie Cochran, write like Barbara Tuchman [the popular historian who wrote, among other things, A Distant Mirror]

I always want to write about something no one else has written about. It’s the first requirement of a song to me. If someone has written about the ceiling in my hotel room, I won’t do it. Secondly, I want to use some language in every song that’s not in every other song. There are 87,000 words in the English language, use them.

No one uses antidisestablishmentarianism in a song, and they should.

Have you?

No, I may do, I’ve used pterodactyls and cormorants and amenuenses and all kinds of things.

Imagine you’re a pop singer and you open your front door and all the words ever in the English language are gathered on the lawn outside your door. Big vocal ones right at the front called “love” and “baby” and “ooh” and “you” and “I” and these are the big loud ones standing right in front of your face saying “pick me, pick me, pick me.” And antidisestablishmentarianism is this tiny little furry creature about 300 yards away, right at the back of the crowd, and in a squeaky little voice is saying “please pick me…”

You know what I mean?

You’re very silly.

Most pop singers just look at the ones at the front, and they’re very smartly dressed, and they’re hip, and they’ve got all the right hairstyles, and they say “sure you can join my group,” and they say to this little brown mouse at the back, “no we’re not having any part of you,” and they slam the door.

Awww.

That is how it works in the English language. These words need people to love them too, and I’m their person.

So with your attention to words, is it safe to say you write the lyrics first?

No, I don’t! I should do, shouldn’t I… but for very good reason, too…When a blues artist makes a record, say, they lay down the backing track… then the guitar player comes in, and plays 6-8-10 different solos and they take the best one. This is the art of improv.

What I do, I make the backing piece, then start improvising the lyrics. On “Year of the Cat” I recorded all the music before I even wrote a word of it. I took home all these backing tracks and sat around with them. I’d already spent all the money from the record companies and had not one damn word written. Then it’s what do all these things suggest to me. I wrote many different sets of lyrics.

This is me being a blues guitar player. “Elvis at the Wheel”  [from Sparks of  AncientLight] ended up being about Elvis Presley. It’s based on a true event in his life. Prior to that it was about the cinema on Hampstead Heath. Prior to that it was a nonsense poem experimenting with being about someone going to a foreign country.

All of the songs on Sparks of Ancient Light had different lyrics apart from “Shah of Shahs.” All the others underwent radical rewrites.

I could go out in an alternate universe go out and play the tunes that everyone knows with completely different lyrics.

Oh I hope you will.

But normally I pick the best ones… the reason I don’t pick the others is that they’re not very good.

So you don’t go in saying I know I want to write a song about Elvis seeing the face of Stalin, you don’t know that ahead of time?

I don’t know what I’m going to write. Some of them read better than they sing. I learned that you can write lyrics that look awfully good on paper but when you sing don’t scan very well, don’t fit the music. I’ve discarded some sets of lyrics that I liked a lot but were hard to sing. I’m a wordslinger, it’s what you do— this is my improv. Right now I could take “Year of the Cat” and turn it into a song about turnips if I wanted to.

I hope you will.

I could do. I also write parodies of my own songs and those of others. “Roads to Moscow,” a song I get asked for the most, it’s set in World War II, and very loosely based on a book by Solzhenitsyn [based on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch], I wrote a parody called “Roads to Adelaide.” I sing it in a major key; it becomes totally ridiculous. It went”

They crossed over the border, the hour before dawn,

moving in lines through the day

most of our sheep are destroyed on the ground where they lay…

It completely cracked me up. You mentioned “American Pie,” I rewrote that into a nineteenth century history song called it “Ukranian Pie.” Amazingly, the Russian word for old peasant that is “musikh” and I couldn’t resist “the day the musikh died.” So I began with

Bye Bye Miss Ukranian Pie

Took my kettle to the shtetl but the shtetl was dry

Those bad old Cossacks drinking vodka and rye

Singing this will be the day that you die

Have you read the book of Lvov, and do you have faith in Romanov…

Do you get asked “what does this or that lyric mean,” and when you do, how do you respond?

People do ask, but in the same way, I don’t know what  Dylan’s “Desolation Row” means…I know all the words…

Selling postcards at the hanging

Painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor’s full of sailors, the circus is in town

I don’t know what Dylan means by this but I get the general picture of what he’s saying.

What are you listening to?  What’s on your ipod?

I don’t have an ipod. But Joanna Newsom, she’s the best, by a long way, I don’t think there’s anyone close. There are always up and coming people. Laura Marling is interesting. Elbow just won album of the year in England. But you know what, I listen to pop too, I like the Veronicas, what can I tell you.

So “Sleepwalking” references “talk among the moneymen in Miami Beach.”  Is it a coincidence?

It wasn’t a coincidence. I think I’m prescient. It’s a song about a Madoff character that I wrote before Madoff. Every now and then these things happen. They fall into place. If you look at my song “On the Border,” largely set in Zimbabwe, it prophesies the decline and fall. Except it was written 36 years ago but it all came true. I did it hypothetically. Madoff came along and obliged me by turning it all into reality.

But you wouldn’t have written it after the fact?

That would be too obvious. I’m trying to write about things that are off the beaten track.

It’s like when I was doing American presidents, I wouldn’t write about Lincoln or Washington, the obvious people, it would be like writing about Napoleon. I would never do that. I would write about Chester Arthur. I like lifting rocks and looking at the dark places of history.

I’m always writing about human beings, using historical backgrounds. Actually what I’m doing is theater. When you look at my historical songs, it’s like the backdrop, the real action is taking place in front of the background. “Constantinople” [off the album 24 Carrots] is about the last seven thousand people who are left defending the Byzantine Empire long after it’s past its sell-by date. What are they doing there? It was a hundred years have gone by since the Byzantine Empire should have been erased from planet.

And there is a relevance to modern day history because As soon as any empire goes from offense to defense, their days are numbered. It’s happened in every single case from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans to I suppose the present day, which I suppose means we should be in Afghanistan, because if we were here building walls it would all be over.

How does it look for America?

America’s still on the offense, very much so…Read the news! I don’t see any particular decline and fall in am military power. There is an enormous exchange of international wealth going on under the surface. America may not… ever have 20% of all the money in the world again. Major changes are economic, but what that will mean in the next 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. One of the most fascinating things that could save America is that… there’s incalculable wealth to be had in arctic circle. Only 5 countries have any claim to the Arctic Circle, two of which are tiny powers, Denmark, Norway… one a medium power, Canada, and then Russia and the USA.

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If that happens, it would probably be too obvious for Stewart to write about.  But if historical songs include the history of the future, we might see a song about America in the Arctic circle sometime soon.

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Gwen Orel writes about theater and music for many publications.  Celtic music owns her, but they timeshare with folk, roots and world.

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Al Stewart’s tour details:

FRI            8/21/09            New York, NY       Rubin Museum of Art / Naked Soul Music Series

SAT            8/22/09            Norfolk, CT           Infinity Hall

SUN            8/23/09            Saratoga Springs, NY   Caffe Lena

FRI            10/30/09 & SAT 10/31/09            Steelville, MO           Wildwood Springs Lodge

SUN            11/1/09            Kansas City, MO                  ?Knuckleheads Saloon

THU            11/5/09            Decatur, GA?Eddie’s Attic

FRI            11/6/09            York, SC?Sylvia Theatre

SAT            11/7/09            Holly Springs, NC                 Holly Springs Cultural Center

FRI            12/18/09            Denver, CO                          L2 Arts & Culture Center

SAT            12/19/09            Berkeley, CA                        Freight & Salvage??? 2010

THU            2/4/2010            Hillsboro, OR            ?Walter’s Art Center

SAT            2/6/2010            Bremerton, WA?          Admiral Theatre

THU            3/4/2010            Newberry, SC             Newberry Opera House

SAT            3/6/2010            Chatham, NJ             Sanctuary Concerts

Last 5 posts by Gwen Orel

• Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at B.B. King's - October 7th, 2009
• Don't Miss: Irish legend Andy Irvine with rising star Irish guitarist John Doyle at the Irish Arts Center, Sept. 9-13 - September 8th, 2009
• Catch up with American troubador John Gorka at the Rubin, 8/7 - August 6th, 2009
• Q&A with Fiddling Groundbreaker Mark O'Connor - August 4th, 2009
• Inner Monologue: The Multi-tasked Critic in the basement, in the park, soaking up a slow drag on Tin Pan Alley (on Broadway) and passing for adolescent in the east village: four plays, four days - July 14th, 2009

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