Review: Cat Stevens’ Reminder of an Innocent Age

Cat Stevens/Harold and Maude/Island/UMC
Four out of Five Stars

As the soundtrack to a film about an unlikely May-December romance between an innocent young man and a wise yet wizened woman many years his senior, the music composed by Cat Stevens and included in the film Harold and Maude was effectively whimsical and wide-eyed as befitting its screenplay. As befitting the times—that is, the end of the ‘60s and the dawn of the ‘70s—it was cloaked in an aura of idealism, more or less testing whether the hopes and happenstance spawned in the decade prior could effectively co-exist in a world beset by battles over civil rights, an unpopular war abroad and a president whose appeals to the silent majority clearly offered no comfort whatsoever to a burgeoning counterculture. 

Like Mike Nichols had done before when assembling a selection of Simon and Garfunkel songs for his soundtrack to The Graduate, Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby readily appropriated a stock of Cat Stevens songs prior to even bringing Stevens on set. Culled from the two albums that had made him hippiedom’s unofficial pied piper—Mona Bone Jakon and its follow-up Tea for the Tillerman—the songs seemed to find a fine fit with the lithe and light-hearted plot, adding enough gravitas to bring some sort of faux philosophic element into play. 

In a sense, then, the Harold and Maude soundtrack becomes an initial best-of collection, albeit one representing only two albums. The inclusion of such indelible offerings as “On the Road to Find Out,” “Miles From Nowhere,” “Tea for the Tillerman,” “Double,” “I Think I See the Light,” and “Where Do the Children Play” added credibility to the collection while also upping the familiarity factor to a great degree. Incidental dialogue and a snippet of some classical recordings (primarily Strauss’ “Blue Danube” and “Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. I  in B”) add atmosphere if not always interest.

The real incentive for collectors comes in the form of two songs exclusive to the soundtrack, album opener “Don’t Be Shy” and the tune that serves as its overall theme of sorts, “If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out.” The latter appears three times, twice with Stevens singing the lead and then again with the characters of Harold and Maude sharing it as a kind of anthem of acceptance. It’s easy and engaging, and a good fit for the giddy pretext of the plot itself. For its part, “Don’t Be Shy” is similarly upbeat and assuring, and, fortunately, easily up to Stevens’ standards.

Likewise, the liner notes that accompany the CD detail the relationship between the music and the movie. Now, newly offered in this stand-alone setting, Harold and Maude becomes a wistful reminder of a more innocent age.