#Cat Stevens #folk rock #pop rock #album rock #singer-songwriter #1970s #music video
This song is a conversation between a father and son, with the father counseling his son to stay home, settle down and find a girl, telling him this is the path to happiness - after all, it worked for him. The son, though, feels compelled to leave and is frustrated because his dad makes no effort to understand why he wants to go or even hear him out.
Stevens made up the story, but his relationship with his own father, Stavros Georgiou, was an influence on the song. His dad owned a restaurant in London, and Cat (known to his dad as Steven Georgiou) worked there as a waiter right up until he signed a record deal at age 17. Stavros was hoping his son would join the family business. When he appeared on The Chris Isaak Hour in 2009, Stevens said: "He was running a restaurant and I was a pop star, so I wasn't following the path that he laid out. But we certainly didn't have any antagonism between us. I loved him and he loved me."
Stevens veered away from his upbringing again in 1977 when he rejected Christianity and became a Muslim, changing his name to Yusuf Islam.
The generational divide that plays out in the lyric can apply to many families, but Stevens had a specific storyline in mind, writing it from the perspective of a father and son in a Russian family during the Russian Revolution (1917-1923). The son wants to join the revolution but his father wants him to stay home and work on the farm. Stevens, a huge fan of show tunes, wrote it in 1969 for a musical he was working on called Revolussia, which is set during the Russian Revolution. The song is part of a scene where the son feels it is his calling to join in, but his father wants him to stay home. The musical never materialized, so the song ended up being the first one written for Stevens' Tea For The Tillerman album. The song has a very unusual structure, which owes to its provenance as a number for a stage musical. There's no chorus, but the son's part is sung louder, providing a kind of hook. The dialogue is an interesting lyrical trick with the father and son expressing different perspectives on the situation.
This is the song that got Stevens signed to Island Records. His first two albums were issued on Deram, a division of Decca. Stevens met with Island boss Chris Blackwell to talk about the musical he wrote this song for, but when Blackwell heard the song, he set his sights on getting Stevens on his label as an artist. Stevens' first Island release was Mona Bone Jakon earlier in 1970; it was not just a new label for Stevens, but a new producer as well, with former Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith taking the helm from Mike Hurst (ex-Springfields), who helped Stevens get his deal with Decca.
In 2020, Stevens released a re-recorded version of "Father and Son" for Tea for the Tillerman 2, a re-imagining of Tea for the Tillerman 50 years later. The revamped rendition brings together his smooth vocals from when he was just 22, and the seasoned voice of the 72-year-old Stevens. Chris Hopewell's top-frame animated video for the new version of "Father And Son" nods to the original release with groovy clips from the original 1970 video. From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/cat-stevens/father-and-son
