Originally published in DoSavannah
Al Stewart’s love of music goes way, way back.
“I don’t know when I got my first record,” says the artist best known for the hit singles, “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages.” His love of history goes back almost as far.
“I was studying French in school and was reading ‘The Outsider’ from Camus,” Stewart says. “I like Camus, and I wanted to read something similar.
“I bought books by Jean-Paul Sartre, his trilogy. I thought I should learn more about this stuff.
“I bought ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’” he says. “Then I went out and bought a history of Russia.”
Stewart’s reading got even deeper.
“I bought books by individual generals and authors who wrote about the period,” he says. By the early 1970s, he says he was reading Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
Eventually, Stewart’s interests began to intertwine. The Scottish singer-songwriter rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s by combining folk-rock songs with tales of characters and events from history.
“I thought maybe there was room in the world for historical musicians,” he says. “I just thought it would work.
“It seems to me when you go back to the earlier stages of the balladeers,” Stewart says, “They were doing what the early Greeks did. The guys with lutes and lyres singing songs about the Peloponnesian War were the CNN of their day.”
Stewart’s latest album is “Uncorked,” a live acoustic recording with his musical partner, Dave Nachmanoff. Stewart and Nachmanoff will appear at the Mars Theatre in Springfield on March 27.
“Year of the Cat” was the title song from Stewart’s platinum album of the same name, which was released in 1976. In 1978, “Time Passages” also was hugely successful.
Stewart played at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon and even lived in the same building as Paul Simon when Simon lived in London.
“We were flatmates in the east end of London,” Stewart says. “I lived next door when he wrote a bunch of songs.
“He was God. I was 19, and had just got off the train. I was in London for the first time.
“Here was a guy who actually got paid,” Stewart says. “We followed him around and tried to learn from him.”
Stewart doubts Simon realized he was the center of so much attention.
“I don’t think he really knew I existed,” he says. “I was part of the wallpaper. I just watched everything he did.”
“Uncorked” is Stewart’s latest record, released on his independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings. He bought his first guitar from Andy Summers, who would become the guitarist with The Police, but Stewart traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one.
On his fifth album, “Past, Present and Future” in 1973, Stewart used a traditional historical storytelling style in songs about Nostradamus, President Warren Harding, World War II, Ernst Röhm, Christine Keeler, Louis Mountbatten and Joseph Stalin’s purges.
Some of Stewart’s newer albums also deal with history. In 2005, he released “A Beach Full of Shells,” set in places varying from WWI England to the 1950s rock ‘n’ roll scene, and in 2008, he released “Sparks of Ancient Light,” with songs about William McKinley, Lord Salisbury and Hanno the Navigator.
While Stewart’s take on history proved popular with listeners, it wasn’t easy to convince studio heads.
“Getting signed to a record label wasn’t easy,” he says. “My second record had an 18-minute song with Jimmy Page playing on it.”
Making “Past, Present and Future” was a big break for Stewart. But it was nothing like the release of “Year of the Cat.”
“That was like climbing a flight of stairs,” he says. “I pretty much always wasn’t thinking commercially. I wasn’t thinking about being a commercial artist until that song took off.
“What happens when you have a record that is a hit is that you have a lot of curious people latch on to it. All of a sudden, there were 1,000 more people in the room, but they were only there for one or two songs.”
At times, Stewart’s style of recording was unusual.
“I recorded all the music first,” he says. “When they’d ask, ‘Where are the words?’ I’d say I hadn’t written them.
“I might write 12 verses or 15 so I could cherry pick,” Stewart says. “‘Year of the Cat’ was first called ‘Horse of the Year’ and ‘Foot at the Stage.’ I like to write multiple sets of lyrics.”
For many years, Stewart has been based in Los Angeles.
“I came for a tour and I just liked the place,” he says. “I didn’t want to go home at the end of tour.
“London was on strike at the time and nothing worked. We kept having power cuts.
“I came to Los Angeles and the sun was shining,” Stewart says. “Everything functioned.”
At the Mars, Stewart will sing old songs and new.
“I don’t have a set list as such,” he says. “There will be one or two things they might know and some they won’t.”
Stewart has released 16 studio and three live albums, and continues to tour widely today.
“In the next three months, I have 33 shows, including 17 in the U.K. in April,” he says. “That’s more than I normally do. I’m busy this year.
“Nobody quits this business,” Stewart says. “You know you’re out of it when the phone doesn’t ring. I would play for free, but if they want me to sit in airports and ride in cars, they’ve got to pay me for all that other stuff.”
Originally published on March 25, 2015.
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