![]() "Nobody quits this business," Stewart says. "In the next three months, I have 33 shows, including 17 in the U.K. Stewart has released 16 studio and three live albums, and continues to tour widely today. "There will be one or two things they might know and some they won't." "I don't have a set list as such," he says. "Everything functioned."Īt the Mars, Stewart will sing old songs and new. ![]() "I came to Los Angeles and the sun was shining," Stewart says. "London was on strike at the time and nothing worked. "I didn't want to go home at the end of tour. "I came for a tour and I just liked the place," he says. "'Year of the Cat' was first called 'Horse of the Year' and 'Foot at the Stage.' I like to write multiple sets of lyrics."įor many years, Stewart has been based in Los Angeles. "I might write 12 verses or 15 so I could cherry pick," Stewart says. "When they'd ask, 'Where are the words?' I'd say I hadn't written them. "I recorded all the music first," he says. All of a sudden, there were 1,000 more people in the room, but they were only there for one or two songs."Īt times, Stewart's style of recording was unusual. "What happens when you have a record that is a hit is that you have a lot of curious people latch on to it. I wasn't thinking about being a commercial artist until that song took off. "I pretty much always wasn't thinking commercially. "That was like climbing a flight of stairs," he says. But it was nothing like the release of "Year of the Cat." Making "Past, Present and Future" was a big break for Stewart. "My second record had an 18-minute song with Jimmy Page playing on it." "Getting signed to a record label wasn't easy," he says. While Stewart's take on history proved popular with listeners, it wasn't easy to convince studio heads. In 2005, he released "A Beach Full of Shells," set in places varying from WWI England to the 1950s rock 'n' roll scene, and in 2008, he released "Sparks of Ancient Light," with songs about William McKinley, Lord Salisbury and Hanno the Navigator. Some of Stewart's newer albums also deal with history. On his fifth album, "Past, Present and Future" in 1973, Stewart used a traditional historical storytelling style in songs about Nostradamus, President Warren Harding, World War II, Ernst Röhm, Christine Keeler, Louis Mountbatten and Joseph Stalin's purges. He bought his first guitar from Andy Summers, who would become the guitarist with The Police, but Stewart traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one. "Uncorked" is Stewart's latest record, released on his independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings. "I don't think he really knew I existed," he says. Stewart doubts Simon realized he was the center of so much attention. "We followed him around and tried to learn from him." "Here was a guy who actually got paid," Stewart says. I was 19, and had just got off the train. "I lived next door when he wrote a bunch of songs. "We were flatmates in the east end of London," Stewart says. Stewart played at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon and even lived in the same building as Paul Simon when Simon lived in London. In 1978, "Time Passages" also was hugely successful. "Year of the Cat" was the title song from Stewart's platinum album of the same name, which was released in 1976. Stewart and Nachmanoff will appear at the Mars Theatre in Springfield on March 27. Stewart's latest album is "Uncorked," a live acoustic recording with his musical partner, Dave Nachmanoff. The guys with lutes and lyres singing songs about the Peloponnesian War were the CNN of their day." ![]() "It seems to me when you go back to the earlier stages of the balladeers," Stewart says, "They were doing what the early Greeks did. "I thought maybe there was room in the world for historical musicians," he says. The Scottish singer-songwriter rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s by combining folk-rock songs with tales of characters and events from history. By the early 1970s, he says he was reading Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.Įventually, Stewart's interests began to intertwine. "I bought books by individual generals and authors who wrote about the period," he says. "Then I went out and bought a history of Russia." "I bought 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,'" he says. I thought I should learn more about this stuff. "I bought books by Jean-Paul Sartre, his trilogy. "I like Camus, and I wanted to read something similar. "I was studying French in school and was reading 'The Outsider' from Camus," Stewart says. His love of history goes back almost as far. "I don't know when I got my first record," says the artist best known for the hit singles, "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages." Al Stewart's love of music goes way, way back. ![]()
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