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Got a good story on how I became an Al Stewart fan. "Year Of The Cat" was one of the first "mature" albums I bought when I was a teenager. Up to that time, my record collection (rather small at the time) consisted mostly of the predictable Kiss, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin fare, which is what most kids considered "cool" at the time.

Al Stewart's "Year Of The Cat" was not considered cool at all when I picked up the album sometime in the late spring of 1977. At that time, the title track was all over the radio and the song even to this day reminds me of the girl I had a huge crush on in my freshmen biology class. I actually asked her out but was turned down because her dad said she was too young to go out on a date. But she liked me and we often exhanged notes in the hallways at school and helped each other out with homework and such during study hall. I finally got my date with her a few years later but that's a story for another thread.

Anyway, that album blew me away when I got it home. Every track fit together so well on that album and I played it all the way through often. My brother and sister ragged on me for playing that album however, calling it "fag" music. Like I said, it was not cool being an Al Stewart fan in those days!

"Time Passages" came out about a year later and that too became one of my favorite albums.

Eventually that music became associated with the unrequited crush I had on that one girl so it got put on the shelf for a while as listening to it would depress me! But in recent years, thanks to seeing Al's concerts on YouTube, I started checking out some of his other albums such as "Modern Times" and "24 Carrots". At that time, I started picking up on all the historical references in his music, something I completely missed the first time around, as I was just a teenager back then.

There's a lot of great concert footage of him on YouTube, both past and present, as I'm sure you are aware.