Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Father and Son
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4 speakers1Transcript13 turns · 26 min
You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. Thanks to Leesa for sponsoring Song Exploder. My annual spring cleaning always starts with good intentions, but this year I actually followed through with something really important. I finally replaced my old mattress. It was a much needed change, honestly. I'd become so used to waking up with aches and pains every morning, I kinda forgot what a good night's sleep was supposed to feel like. Leesa has a lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses that are tailored to how you sleep. So I found the right mattress for me by taking the Leesa sleep quiz on their website. Took less than two minutes to complete, and it'll tell you exactly the right mattress for you. So go to leesa.com for 20% off select mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code SongExploder. That's exclusive for Song Exploder listeners. Again, it's L-E-E-S-A.com and the promo code is SongExploder for 20% off select mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Support our show by letting them know that we sent you after your checkout. Leesa.com with the promo code SongExploder. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting some of our friends in Philadelphia this summer. And so while we've been daydreaming, I've been looking on Booking.com to check out places where we might stay in Philly. I put in our dates and there are over 100 options listed. So I'm gonna start narrowing things down. I'm gonna choose places that have an eight or higher rating and a king bed available. And then I'm gonna focus on hotels in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. And look, there's a hotel here with a 9.0 rating, and there's a note on the site that says, "Couples in particular like this hotel. They rated it a 9.5 for a two-person trip." All right, so look at that. That sounds pretty awesome. You can find exactly what you're booking for. Booking.com, booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app. There's a Steven Soderbergh movie called The Limey, and it stars the late Terence Stamp, the British actor. And in the movie, there are moments where Terence Stamp's character drifts into memory and it goes into a flashback. And in those flashbacks to his younger self, they cut to footage of Terence Stamp from the 1967 film Poor Cow. There's no weird CGI de-aging or anything. You get to see his actual younger self, and I just love that. I was thinking about that recently, and it made me wanna revisit this episode because Yusuf/Cat Stevens kind of did a musical version of that same thing when he re-recorded his song Father and Son. I think it's such a fascinating way to document the actual passing of time, by interacting with your younger self. This episode came out originally in 2021, and it was a special episode of the podcast also because it was our 200th. Here it is. [singing] The legendary singer-songwriter Yusuf/Cat Stevens released his first album in 1967. He's a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and his albums have sold millions. In 2020, he
2Episode notes
The legendary singer/songwriter Yusuf / Cat Stevens released his first album in 1967. He’s a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and his albums have sold millions. In 2020, he released Tea for the Tillerman², a re-imagining of his hit 1970 album Tea for the Tillerman. In the song “Father & Son,” he sings a duet between the two title characters, doing both voices. But in the 2020 version, he approached this song in a kind of astonishing way—he recorded the part of the father, but for the part of the son, he used a live recording of himself from 1970, taken from a show he played at The Troubadour in Los Angeles. So the two parts are still both sung in his voice, but 50 years apart. In this episode, the 200th episode of Song Exploder, Yusuf / Cat Stevens tells the story of how he created, and then re-created “Father & Son.”
For more, visit songexploder.net/yusuf-cat-stevens.