Cat Stevens - Tea for the Tillerman


Look at that, another day has passed and we're at the finding out what i'll listen to next part. I always take door number 3, and crazily enough it's Cat Stevens's 4th album. Op, 'scuse me while i detour around this hallway pointedly not lined with religious iconography and inadvertently stumble down the one containing a fervently ridiculous semantic argument about the etymology of "Tillerman." 

No joke, people get seriously worked up and start citing the Oxford English Dictionary and passive aggressively suggesting the character on the front doesn't look like he even knows what a firetruck is. One guy was even like "attempting to decipher the meaning of the word from the painting on the cover is a dubious and highly questionable act of uneducated buffoonery!" 

"Whaaaaa?!," Bottle interobanged. You're seriously confused about creative wordsmithery when there's children from Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal climbing a tree, and a lady summoning lightning in the background? Redbeard McHappydude is the least interesting thing in this Cat Stevens painting; who cares what his actual occupation happens to be when the Wicker Man meets Tom Bombadil vibes are this strong? 

Tea for the Tillerman is the album that propelled Cat Stevens into ubiquitous public consciousness, and a major part of the soundtrack to that truly bizarre movie Harold & Maude. Yeah, recording this album is literally the least interesting thing anyone has done with this album. You could conceivably write any song you wanted that didn't have robots in it and it would work for this concept. Actually listening to the album from start to finish is practically superfluous. So, let's do that. 

But first, we'll detour through the emergency room because the josinator's having some wicked abdominal pain. 5 hours later we're back home and pretty sure it's not appendicitis, so that's good. I, however, am exhausted, so i guess we'll just give it a go tomorrow... 

... welp, morning has broken (wrong album), let's get some Coffee for the Bottleman a brewin' and feed my menagerie of animals. 

Ah, here we are. Hot buttered cornbread, that's a fantastic album. You could go way down all sorts of intellectual rabbit holes, but you can also just take a seat and enjoy watching the rabbit scamper around. My brain isn't really wired to disassemble things that are awesome, i enjoy enjoying them too much. I'm also not a huge fan of listicles, but i haven't topped a thousand albums on this particular journey yet, so go ahead and give it a listen before you die. The string parts are amazing. Anybody telling you that dynamics are anathema to soulless pop the way they say it should be is totally wrong; for Soft Rock, there's a couple moments of Death Metal hiding in here. All the thumbs up. As albums go, Tea for the Tillerman has no room for improvement. Time to go outside and attempt to accomplish something before other things randomly postpone the next album. Cheers.

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