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'Year of the Cat' singer-songwriter Al Stewart performs Saturday at the Palace Theatre | TribLIVE.com
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'Year of the Cat' singer-songwriter Al Stewart performs Saturday at the Palace Theatre

Paul Guggenheimer
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Courtesy of Randall Armor
Al Stewart, right, with his band The Empty Pockets, will perform at The Palace Theatre in Greensburg on Saturday, April 16.

Folk rock singer and guitarist Al Stewart remembers driving down Sunset Strip decades ago in the bright sunshine of West Hollywood, Calif., in a yellow Karmann Ghia.

The year was 1976 and Stewart had a hit song called “Year of the Cat” — but he wasn’t fully aware of just how big a hit it was at the time.

“I was thinking I had died and gone to Heaven when my record came on the radio and I hit the next button (to another station) and there it was again, and I thought ‘Whoa!’ ” said Stewart, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, but grew up in a southwest English town called Wimborne.

His mother moved them there after his father, who served in the Royal Air Force, died in a plane crash during a 1945 training exercise before Stewart was born.

“I had lived in England for 30 years and I was never played on the radio,” he said. “Absolutely never.”

Stewart, who has been well known in America and a resident of the Los Angeles area ever since “Year of the Cat” was released, has started touring again after a two-year hiatus caused by the pandemic.

Following three postponements, Stewart, 76, will be performing with his band The Empty Pockets at 8 p.m. on Saturday at The Palace Theatre in Greensburg.

“Year of the Cat” was a hit in just about every country in the world except England. It went to number three in Brazil and was in the top 10 in South Africa, to name a couple. But the song just missed being included on the British TV show “Top of the Pops.” Stewart blames it on the song never being properly promoted in England.

“If you were played on ‘Top of the Pops’ you had a hit. And their policy was that they would play any song that made the top 30 and ‘Year of the Cat’ made No. 31 and they didn’t play it. So I missed it by one place,” said Stewart, laughing. “The next week it was No. 35 and then it was gone.”

Released three months later in the U.S. — October 1976 — the song was a sensation.

In an interview with the Tribune-Review, Stewart discussed how “Year of the Cat,” the album’s title track, evolved.

“I had a girlfriend who had a book on Vietnamese astrology and it was open to a chapter called ‘Year of the Cat’ and I said, ‘that sounds like a song title, let’s see where it goes.’ ”

Where it went was No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1977. Although Stewart had a higher charting single with 1978’s “Time Passages,” “Year of the Cat” is the song that captured America’s imagination. (The album went to No. 5 in the U.S.)

With its haunting piano opening, it tells the story of a serendipitous love affair with its evocative lyrics: “She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running / like a watercolor in the rain / don’t bother asking for explanations / she’ll just tell you that she came / in the year of the cat.”

Stewart, whose work is primarily rooted in the folk genre, explained that he makes records in “the most eccentric way imaginable” and “Year of the Cat” is no exception.

“My way of working in those days was to bring the backing tracks back home and get up in the morning and play them and see what they suggested to me,” he said. “ ’Year of the Cat’ had at least four different sets of lyrics. At one point it was called ‘Horse of the Year’ and it was about Princess Anne. ‘Princess Anne rode off on the horse of the year,’ which I thought was hilarious but no one else did.”

As enjoyable as the song and album “Year of the Cat” are, to look no further into Stewart’s canon would be to cheat oneself.

Stewart’s passion for history has paid off handsomely for the man and his fans. A voracious reader, Stewart explained when reached for this interview that he was in the middle of “Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s” by British journalist Paul Johnson.

That particular period in history has informed much of Stewart’s best work, especially on his fifth studio album, “Past, Present and Future.” Released in 1974, it’s considered his first major album and includes a couple of songs that amount to mini-operas — “Nostradamus,” a nearly 10-minute tribute to the French astrologer, physician and reputed seer, and the incredibly prescient “Roads to Moscow.”

“The songs themselves keep coming true. I mean I have a line in ‘Roads to Moscow’ for example, ‘All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine.’ Now how current is that?

“I had made four albums about love affairs and what have you, and I knew I had to change and do something different,” said Stewart. “ ‘Past, Present and Future’ came out and it outsold my first four albums put together, and I thought, ‘OK, there’s room for one folk rock / historical songwriter in the world and I’m going to be it.’ ”

He’s even written a song called “Warren Harding” in which he includes the American president’s middle name, Gamaliel, in a clever use of syllables.

“I have studied all of the American presidents,” said Stewart. “Warren Gamaliel Harding — Gamaliel sounds like it should come from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ — I just like the flow of it.”

These days, Stewart said, he has no immediate plans to record another album with the pandemic “removing the impetus somewhat. But even before that, my answer to that question was when people start buying records by folk rock septuagenarians, I’ll make another one.”

Besides, he’s too caught up with reading, watching movies daily with his wife, Jill, and enjoying his vast wine collection — the French government has made him a Master Councilor of French wine.

But Stewart said he is enjoying being back on the road playing concerts again with The Empty Pockets.

“Basically I feel like I’m 37 or something and I’m playing in a band,” he said. “I don’t feel 76 and because of the two years off, I’m kind of removed from all of those songs. I would listen to (my) songs because I had to do some rehearsals to remember them and I was saying, ‘this isn’t bad, where did this come from?’ ”

Noting that tickets are selling well for Saturday’s Greensburg show, Stewart remarked that his fans remain loyal.

“It’s astonishing to me all these years later that it just carries on. There are those people in the world who get what I’m doing and the vast majority of people do not get what I’m doing,” he said. “So, I don’t play to them. I play to the people who understand it.”

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