Featured In
ALBUMKing of a LandCat Stevens
Albums by Cat Stevens
ALBUMKing of a LandCat Stevens
ALBUMTell 'Em I'm GoneYusuf
ALBUMIzitsoCat Stevens
ALBUMNumbersCat Stevens
ALBUMBuddha and the Chocolate BoxCat Stevens
ALBUMForeignerCat Stevens
ALBUMCatch Bull At Four (50th Anniversary Remaster)Cat Stevens
ALBUMHarold And Maude (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Deluxe Edition]Cat Stevens
ALBUMTeaser And The Firecat (2021 Remaster)Cat Stevens
ALBUMTea for the Tillerman (2020 Remaster)Cat Stevens
Cat Stevens's Popular Music Videos
Father and Son
Cat Stevens
Moonshadow
Cat Stevens
Wild World (2020 Version)
Cat Stevens
Bruce Parry Presents Amazon Tribe - Songs for Survival
Bruce Parry, Apparatjik, KT Tunstall, Yusuf Islam, Skin & Jason Mraz
Morning Has Broken (Remastered 2021 / Lyric Video)
Cat Stevens
Lady D’Arbanville
Cat Stevens
Can't Keep It In (Lyric Video)
Cat Stevens
Butterfly
Yusuf / Cat Stevens
Bitterblue² (Reimagined 2021 / Lyric Video)
Cat Stevens
Toy Heart
Yusuf / Cat Stevens
Artist Playlists
At Home With Yusuf / Cat Stevens: The Playlist
“We're kind of surviving, and surviving well.”
Artist Biography
Many songwriters explored rock’s growing fascination with spirituality in the ’70s, but few would embrace faith as deeply as the Englishman originally known as Cat Stevens. His early singles—such as the soon-to-be-endlessly covered ballad “The First Cut Is the Deepest”—were often dressed in baroque strings, catching the era’s lush pop-meets-psychedelia vibe. But a nearly fatal case of tuberculosis in 1969 found Stevens rethinking not only his ornate music, but also his life’s path forward. He stripped his newly acoustic folk songs of the era’s orchestra-sized excesses to uncover their emotional core, gently leading a generation of listeners through a fraught decade. That warm-and-wise voice captured wistful tales of fraying love (“Wild World”), united crowds with hopeful anthems for social change (“Peace Train”), and sketched family life at its most poignant (“Father and Son”). Stevens spent nearly a decade strumming his way toward enlightenment, but his 1977 conversion to Islam soon ended his career as an introspective pop singer. Decades of public silence and private humanitarian work followed. When he returned in the 2000s as the rechristened Yusuf Islam, his explorations into world music retained the sweetness that left audiences feeling uplifted even when he was crooning the most sorrowful of tunes, while his embrace of religion and self-actualization revealed moving new dimensions to a long-beloved catalog.
Hometown
Genre
Pop