Strange Bedsitterfellows

Posted on | March 8, 2007 at 6:48 am | Comments Off

Musician Al Stewart has been a guilty pleasure of mine since, oh… high school or so, when I first heard Year Of The Cat and then went in search of his back catalog. I’m actually more fond of his pre-YotC/pre-American fame output, though there was some sporadic good and even great stuff in the later years. The two albums preceding YotC, Modern Times and Past, Present & Future, are what I consider his classics. Strangely, both albums feature Marvel hero Dr. Strange on their original cover art. I just found out that Collector’s Choice is issuing remastered versions of a number of his albums from various points in his career (though not PP&F??) on June 26th. A number of these contain previously unreleased bonus tracks, most of which appeared on a fan-club only release originally. So in order to get all those tracks, you have to buy those reissues. Why didn’t they just release the fan-club album as a separate disc? Oh right… money. Let’s soak the fans.

(Supposedly his first three albums were never released on CD, so it’s a big deal that they’re finally doing that. However, I’ve got a CD compilation from 1993 called To Whom It May Concern 1966-1970 which has all the songs from those albums, plus some early non-album singles. And this compilation is still available.)

Two exceptions to the fan-club release tracks are two songs on the new issue of the 1988 Last Days Of The Century album that are demos that Al co-wrote with, of all people, Tori Amos. She also sang background vocals on the album. I did not know there was ever any involvement between the two of them. This was from the period after Tori’s Y Kant Tori Read tanked but before she found popularity with Little Earthquakes. I am kind of curious about what those two songs sound like and will probably pick up at least that disc.