Cat Stevens - Vina del Mar Festival, Quinta Vergara, Vina del Mar, Chile, 2-27-2015

In the past few years, Cat Stevens has had a really impressive career renaissance that I think most people have missed. In my opinion, in terms of live shows, this is the best representation of that. His voice sounds exactly the same as it did in the 1970s. Really!

In my opinion, Stevens' creative heyday was in the early 1970s, and his record sales reflect that. As the 1970s went on, his songwriting declined and the production on his records got worse. He quit the music industry entirely by the end of that decade, and devoted his life to his new religion of Islam. For a time, he changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and then just to Yusuf. For his most recent album, released in 2017, he's gone back to "Cat Stevens," so I'm calling him that for consistency's sake.

In the 1990s, Stevens gradually returned to music, but he put out albums about Islam and sang mostly in Arabic, so that had limited appeal. He returned to English secular music with the 2006 album "An Other Cup," and then with the album "Roadsinger" in 2009. But in my opinion, although the production on those albums was okay, his songwriting didn't have the special magic of his 1970s heyday.

That takes us to 2014, and this concert. He put out the album "Tell 'Em I'm Gone," which was mostly filled with bluesy covers. But they were done really well, and the few originals on it were the best songs he did since the 1970s, in my opinion. He's followed that with a 2017 album, "The Laughing Apple," which I think is even better. It sounds exactly like it was recorded in 1971, and a lot of the songs on it actually were written in the late 1960s. If you're a Cat Stevens fan, you really need to check it out. It's amazing to me that he has his mojo back after so many years.

Since 2014 especially, Stevens has been touring a fair amount, doing his first tours of the US and Europe since the 1970s. But unfortunately, he hasn't put out a live album, and all the bootlegs from that time that I've sampled have average to poor sound quality.

Except for this one show, thankfully. Apparently, this concert was professionally recorded and shown on TV in Chile. The video of it has made its way to YouTube (where you can still watch it), and it's been seen by a couple of million people. Unfortunately, I downloaded that video, and it's only in mono. But I discovered the concert organizers uploaded each individual song to YouTube as well, and those are in stereo.

So that's what this is, a compilation of all those stereo YouTube videos, converted to mp3 and put in their proper order. One snag was that the individual videos generally faded out in the middle of the applause at the end of each song, and the next song would begin with the clapping still going on. So I went through all the songs and carefully removed all the annoying fade ins and fade outs while still keeping the applause. I also cut out several minutes of announcers talking in Spanish at the beginning of the concert, then again at the start of the encore to give Stevens an award, and more at the very end.

The end result is an hour and a half concert that probably has the best sound quality of any live recording of Stevens' entire career (since recording technology wasn't as good in the 1970s). The setlist is great. He does his classic 1960s and 1970s songs, with a few covers from his 2014 album sprinkled in. It's played with a full band (including Alun Davies, who has been his right hand man and lead guitarist since 1970, incredibly enough).

01 Wild World (Cat Stevens)
02 Where Do the Children Play (Cat Stevens)
03 The First Cut Is the Deepest (Cat Stevens)
04 Here Comes My Baby (Cat Stevens)
05 talk (Cat Stevens)
06 Dying to Live (Cat Stevens)
07 talk (Cat Stevens)
08 You Are My Sunshine (Cat Stevens)
09 Oh Very Young (Cat Stevens)
10 [Remember the Days of the] Old Schoolyard (Cat Stevens)
11 Sad Lisa (Cat Stevens)
12 Miles from Nowhere (Cat Stevens)
13 talk (Cat Stevens)
14 People Get Ready (Cat Stevens)
15 Maybe There's a World - All You Need Is Love (Cat Stevens)
16 talk (Cat Stevens)
17 If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out (Cat Stevens)
18 talk (Cat Stevens)
19 How Can I Tell You (Cat Stevens)
20 talk (Cat Stevens)
21 Roadsinger (Cat Stevens)
22 Moonshadow (Cat Stevens)
23 talk (Cat Stevens)
24 The Devil Came from Kansas (Cat Stevens)
25 Trouble (Cat Stevens)
26 Sitting (Cat Stevens)
27 talk (Cat Stevens)
28 Big Boss Man (Cat Stevens)
29 Rubylove (Cat Stevens)
30 Morning Has Broken (Cat Stevens)
31 talk (Cat Stevens)
32 Peace Train (Cat Stevens)
33 talk (Cat Stevens)
34 Father and Son (Cat Stevens)
35 talk (Cat Stevens)
36 Another Saturday Night (Cat Stevens)

https://www.imagenetz.de/gtsiD

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/XvhenLiP

For the album cover, I've used a photo of Stevens from 2015, but it's from the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ceremony about two months after this concert.