Numbers (Cat Stevens Album)
Numbers is concept album by singer/songwriter Cat Stevens released in November 1975. Subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale", it is a concept album based on a fictional planet in a far-off galaxy named Polygor and the "Polygons" who inhabit its palace. The album includes a booklet with excerpts from the planned book of the same name, written by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, and contains pen-and-ink illustrations by Stevens.
The idea shaped into a fantastic, spiritual musical set on the planet Polygor. In the story, there is a castle with a number machine. This machine exists to fulfill the sole purpose of the planet: to disperse numbers to the rest of the universe—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (but notably, not 0). The nine inhabitants of Polygor, called "Polygons", are Monad, Dupey, Trezlar, Cubis, Qizlo, Hexidor, Septo, Octav, and Novim. As the last lines of the book say, they "followed a life of routine that had existed for as long as any could remember. ... It was, therefore, all the more shocking when on an ordinary day things first started to go wrong." The change takes the form of Jzero, who comes from nowhere as a slave and eventually confuses everybody with his simple truth.
The album was released along with the albums Izitso and Back to Earth in a box set called Three from the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab label. It is now out of print.
Read more about Numbers (Cat Stevens Album): Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words numbers and/or stevens:
“All experience teaches that, whenever there is a great national establishment, employing large numbers of officials, the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many of the worthy.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.
Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow
Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)