Yusuf taps into his Cat years: A new album marks the musician's 50-year career with a return to his classic sound
An inescapable sense of foreboding runs through "Blackness of the Night," the opening track from "The Laughing Apple," the new album by Yusuf, a.k.a. Cat Stevens.
"In the blackness of the night I seem to wander endlessly, with a hope burning out deep inside," Yusuf sings in the same soft, gravelly baritone that helped make him one of pop music's biggest stars of the 1970s. "I'm a fugitive; community has driven me out/ For this bad, bad world, I'm beginning to doubt."
That's a far cry from such buoyant and exquisitely uplifting pop hits of yore as "Morning Has Broken," "Moonshadow" and "Oh Very Young" that he charted more than four decades ago, before bowing out of "the star-making machinery" at the end of the '70s and devoting himself to his
