On September 23, 1977, Yusuf Islam — known to the world as Cat Stevens — threw his gold records into the sea. This is the version of the story that has been told and retold, the symbolic gesture that stands in for a more complicated and more gradual process of spiritual transformation that had been developing for several years. The gold records may or may not have entered the sea — accounts differ on the specific dramatics — but the essential fact is not in dispute: the man who had written Wild World, Father and Son, Peace Train, and Tea for the Tillerman stopped making music in 1977 and did not return to it for twenty-five years.
The decision was religious — Stevens had converted to Islam and concluded, after considerable personal reflection, that the kind of popular music he had been making was incompatible with his new faith and with the life he wanted to live. He gave away the money he had earned. He focused on education and charity. He became, in the two decades of his public absence, one of the most debated figures in popular music — a man whose decision to walk away was interpreted variously as courage, waste, tragedy, and integrity depending on who was doing the interpreting.
The song he recorded in the final months before his withdrawal was Father and Son revisited in his own mind — not a new recording but a renewed understanding of the song he had written years earlier about the tension between a father’s caution and a son’s need to leave. He has said in interviews since his return to music in 2006 that he heard the song differently after his conversion — that the father’s voice in the lyric, advising patience and stillness, had become more resonant for him than the son’s urgency to move. He had spent his youth in the son’s position. He spent two decades in the father’s.
The morning after he made his decision final — after whatever version of the gold-records-in-the-sea story actually happened — he has described a specific quality of silence. Not absence but presence. A quiet that he had not experienced in the years of touring and recording and the particular noise of being famous in the 1970s. He has said it was not difficult, in that moment. He has said the difficulty came later, in smaller ways, when specific songs surfaced in specific contexts and he missed the music in ways that faith alone did not entirely address.
He returned to recording as Yusuf Islam in 2006. He has since toured, released new material, and performed his Cat Stevens catalog in concerts that are among the most emotionally charged events on the current touring calendar — audiences who grew up with the music encountering a man who walked away from it and came back changed. Father and Son in those concerts carries a weight it did not have in 1971. He is no longer singing either part from the inside. He is singing both parts from somewhere further away, and the distance is the thing.