Course:Tea for the Tillerman
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Suburban basements. Inner city attics. Airport hotel rooms. Off their phone, my mp3 player, her turntable. We'd listen to this one everywhere.
Yusuf (formerly Cat Stevens)'s Tea for the Tillerman was the soundtrack to so many nights drinking disgusting tequila on bikes, riding through a city that didn't give a fuck about our new haircuts, our irrevocable idealism.
I don't think we were particularly regular high school kids.
We absorbed and unpacked every line. They became our mantras. Our gospel.
"From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen"
- lyric from Father and Son by Yusuf (Cat Stevens), 1970
We took ourselves so seriously. We cared too much. It was awesome. This album is awesome.
The lyricism of these songs belongs to the poetry of my adolescence. This album was the first suggestion to me that one might find spirituality and transcendence in places that are not Catholicism. That "God" can be found in so many other places: in philosophy, in people, in art. There's an intimacy to the album that, at the age of 15, set me on a journey of getting to know myself. And we just kept listening to it. And even still, when I'm not listening to the album itself, I'm listening to what it urged me to uncover: that there is spirituality inside of me. Is it my gender? Because this is a thing that, like spirituality, is something we can believe in beyond the material. There is a knowing to my transness that exists beyond what can be described with words. A connection between all of these concepts was made for me then, and has lived in me since. I credit the power of storytelling to my receiving this offering.
This album is also an apt representation of the ways in which "the specific releases the universal" (to quote my dramaturg, Brian Drader) in writing and storytelling. So many of the events of this album are not exact depictions of my experience, and yet my connection to their specificity allowed a young me to deeply learn something about myself. And that young me continues to teach today's me similar lessons.