Father and Son by Cat Stevens

“Father and Son” Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) live performance
“Father and Son” music video

Dear Boyzone fan,

Recently I came across a video of you with a stadium full of your fellow Boyzone fans cheering at a Boyzone concert. I understand how boy-bands like Boyzone provide an escape for many pre-teen and teenage girls like yourself.

I’ve seen stadiums of girls going crazy over singers starting with Elvis Presley, rising to new peaks with the Beatles and continuing with bands like Bon Jovi. That’s nothing out of the ordinary. What was odd, and honestly kind of bizarre was how the song that the entire audience was singing along to was “Father and Son.”

Most of the time when you see thousands of girls singing along to pop songs, they are rock anthems or love songs which have relatively simple lyrics without deep layers of meaning. So you can see how Boyzone is unusual in choosing to cover “Father and Son,” one of popular music’s most personal, powerful and emotionally brutal songs.

I’m not trying to discredit Boyzone’s performance or recording of “Father and Son” but rather, I want to illuminate some things about the song that you love so much. Studying the meaning of the words and understanding the history rarely diminishes my personal enjoying of the song but rather adds a layer of meaning that only makes the song better.

Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, originally composed and recorded “Father and Son” in 1970. Stevens sold over 60 million albums in the 1960s and 1970s At the peak of his fame in the 1977, he converted to Muslim, changed his names to Yusuf Islam and left the music industry. He has only recently released started performing music and his first album since the 1970s, Roadsinger.

As one of the most successful solo male artist of his times, Stevens set himself apart singing about relationships in an revealing and powerful way. With songs like “Wild World,” Stevens added a unique perspective on life with a folk music style that challenging artists of the time to dig deeper into the complexities of human relationships.

“Father and Son” is unique in the fact that the song is a conversation between a father and his son. Cat Stevens differentiated these two characters by singing with darker tone for the father and a brighter tone for the son. Stevens does not provide any that explains the context of the song. Instead, he starts in the middle of the scene as the father responds to the son.

We can gather from the father’s opening words that the son feels he needs to make a change. The father tries to reassure his sn but some bitterness seeps through when he says tells his son that he is young and that’s his sons fault. The father cites his own life as proof that he need not do something drastic to find happiness.

The father continues talking about how he was in his son’s shoes. He says that he knows “that’s its not easy, to be calm when you’ve found something going on.” He encourages his son to think about everything that he has because “you [the son] will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.”

We do not hear the son’s words in response to his father but instead his thoughts. The son explains, “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.” The son is so focused on the fact that he feels that his father does not validate his thoughts and feelings that he is completely closed to any advice his father has to give.

The father continues, repeating what he just said to his son again. We hear the son’s thoughts in the background, ”away, I know I have to make this decision alone, no.” It’s as if the son is standing there being lectured, holding in his words as they have proved useless, trying to will his thoughts to his father.

The son responds “all the times I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, it’s hard but its harder to ignore it.” He explains that if these feelings were right, he’d agree but “its them [other people] you know not me.” None of these ideas and thoughts feel like his own anymore. It’s his father’s words, it’s people telling him how to be and in order to feel independent, to be himself, he feels he needs to go away. Behind his son’s struggle the father’s thoughts echo in the background, “stay, why must you go and make this decision alone?”

Everything that is between this father and son, are within all of us. There are times when we try to give advice and it’s not taken because not because our advice is bad, but because the people who we seek to help need us more to listen than to advise.

On the other side, there are times when we need to communicate what we feel, and be willing to listen to advice and trust people who simply through living longer may know better. We struggle for so much of our life to be independent, sometimes we forget, that independence is not an end goal, but a means to leaning to know ourselves. Sometimes out focus on independence blinds us to the feelings of the people around us.

I don’t know if you felt all of this when you were singing along with Boyzone. If you weren’t, it’s no a big deal, but now that you know more about this song, I hope it’s more meaningful. Is it a little weird for “Father and Son” to be a boy-band song? Yeah, but is it a horrible thing, not really. Boyzone’s version of the song bring people to “Father and Son” who otherwise never would have heard it and give them a glimpse of the complexity of love and the struggles that define our relationships.