Year of the Cat is the seventh studio album by Al Stewart, released in 1976 and engineered by Alan Parsons; it is considered his masterpiece, its sales helped by the hit single "Year of the Cat", "one of those 'mysterious woman' songs," co-written by Peter Wood. The other single from the album was "On the Border". Stewart wrote "Lord Grenville" about the Elizabethan sailor and explorer Sir Richard Grenville (1542–1591).
Stewart had all of the music and orchestration written and completely recorded before he even had a title of any of the songs. In a Canadian radio interview he stated that he has done this for 6 of his albums, and he often writes four different sets of lyrics for each song. The title track derives from a song Stewart wrote in 1966 called "Foot of the Stage" with prescient lyrics about Tony Hancock, one of Britain's favorite comedians who tragically committed suicide two years later. When Stewart discovered that Hancock was not well known in the United States, he went back to his original title "Year of the Cat".
Read more about Year Of The Cat: Cover Art, Personnel, Charts
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or cat:
“Listen, that’s the one that done it. The dusters. They started it anyways. Blowin’ like this year after year. Blowin’ the land away. Blowin’ the crops away. Blowin’ us away now.”
—Nunnally Johnson (1897–1977)
“You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)