Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat Rewards More Than Its Title Track

Al Stewart’s seventh album arrived in 1976 with two clear commercial markers: a No. 5 position on the American albums chart and a Top 10 single in its title track. Numbers like that tend to shrink a record down to its best-known song, and Year of the Cat has spent decades living in the shadow of its own signature moment. The other eight tracks are worth the detour.

Stewart came to it slowly. The Scottish songwriter spent years on London’s folk circuit before his partnership with Alan Parsons, first on Modern Times, sharpened the arrangements around his narrative instincts. That collaboration gives Year of the Cat its finish without sanding off the strangeness underneath.

What holds attention is harmonic rather than dramatic. Stewart slides between major and minor chords mid-narrative, recasting the emotional weather of a song without announcing the turn. “Sand in Your Shoes” begins as breezy folk-pop and has darkened considerably by its third verse, the accordion withheld until the moment it earns its entrance. “Flying Sorcery” works a similar trick more quietly, guitar figures flicking against the vocal, a chord cycle under the harmonica doing the deeper damage.

The album’s architecture resists easy mapping. Verses and choruses blur into each other, and George Ford’s supple bass on “If It Doesn’t Come Naturally, Leave It” carries a song where momentum and arrival seem to happen at once. Half a century later, that restraint is the reason to go back.