Cat Bark

"If you want something to be different than it is, you might as well teach a cat to bark." ~ Byron Katie

"Yusuf (aka Cat Stevens) has released a new album marking his 50th anniversary in music, "The Laughing Apple," including several previously unrecorded songs he wrote at the outset of his career. "Among the newer songs included on “The Laughing Apple” is “Don’t Blame Them,” a firmly worded but gently rendered heed against the search for scapegoats.

“Don’t blame the girl/She won’t do you wrong/The veil she wears/On her long dark hair/Mary would have done,” he sings.

“We usually try to find something to blame our problems on,” he said, “and the solution is in the mirror — that’s where all our problems really began. This song does have a massive message. When we blame, we tend to project the balance in our own favor.

“I think the best kind of people are those who can stand in the middle and watch what’s going on around them,” he said, “and then evaluate, and decide what to do.”

The song itself urges listeners to “Understand the one you hate/Anger will abate/Love will moderate.”

As a convert to Islam, Yusuf has been on the receiving end of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy.

In 2004, he was denied entry into the U.S. — where he had toured arenas and played to tens of thousands of fans three decades earlier — en route to a planned recording session in Nashville because the name he took after converting, Yusuf Islam, was similar to one on a federal Do Not Fly list assembled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He was accused of supporting terrorism in 2004 by the British publications the Sun and the Sunday Times, and in 2008 of refusing to speak to unveiled women. He challenged both accusations in court and received formal apologies from the news organizations and substantial financial settlements, which he donated to charity.

More recently, the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict travel to the U.S. by people from numerous Muslim-majority countries have complicated his ability to continue to perform and work here.

While in Australia on tour in March, he told the U.K.’s Daily Independent newspaper, “I would definitely like Mr. Trump to use his influence, whatever is left of it, to rush my visa forward because I’ve already missed the Grammys and I might even give him a free ticket to one of my concerts.”

He stopped short of suggesting he is being individually persecuted by the policy put forth by Trump.

“He’s not exactly keeping me out, but it’s become a drawn-out process,” he told the Daily Independent. “Those orders, it’s such a horrible paintbrush he’s using.”

Yusuf said he’s planning to travel to New York shortly “to sort all that out.”

Last year he traveled in the U.S. on a 50th-anniversary tour that played the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. Performance highlights from that tour will be featured in a future PBS television special.

Unlike most of his ’60s and ’70s peers who were writing love songs or social and political protest music, Cat Stevens was probing deeply spiritual matters.

“After I contracted tuberculosis [at 21], everything I did was because of the fear of death and the beyond,” he said. “I wanted desperately to know whether life goes on, whether everything comes to an absolute stop or if there’s a better place to go. That’s where spiritual investigation becomes necessary — at least, where it became necessary for me.”

Songs he wrote after that near-death experience expressed that deep yearning, such as “On the Road to Find Out,” “I Wish I Knew,” “Miles From Nowhere,” “Time,” “But I Might Die Tonight” and “I Think I See the Light.”

“It’s the whole story of my life and my music,” he said, “and if you ask me now, I believe I’ve found some answers which absolutely hold up.”

~ Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times