Buddha and the Chocolate Box

1	Music 4:21
2	Oh Very Young 2:36
3	Sun/C79 4:35
4	Ghost Town 3:10
5	Jesus 2:14
6	Ready 3:18
7	King of Trees 5:07
8	A Bad Penny 3:21
9	Home in the Sky 3:38

All Music Guide

On Foreigner, his seventh album, Cat Stevens, living outside his native England for a year for tax reasons, recorded without his usual producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, and his usual second guitarist, Alun Davies. While the result was his fifth consecutive gold album and his fourth straight Top Ten hit, the record actually marked a small drop commercially and encountered critical resistance for the lengthy "Foreigner Suite" that took up all of Side 1. Eight months later, Buddha and the Chocolate Box found Stevens back in England and back with Samwell-Smith and Davies. It also marked a return to the simpler style of earlier albums. No song ran much over five minutes, the arrangements were sparer and featured more acoustic guitar, and the lyrics did not take off into discursive ruminations about the state of the universe. It was very much as if Stevens were deliberately trying to make an album like Teaser and the Firecat, his commercial and artistic apex. "Oh Very Young," for example, was identifiably the work of the man who had recorded "Moon Shadow" and "Morning Has Broken," rather than the author of "The Hurt" and "Sitting." It was a gentle, melodic ballad, full of fatherly advice, and the 25-year-old bachelor followed it with "Sun/C79," a fantasy of the future in which he described to a child how he had met its mother years before when he was a pop star and she attended one of his concerts. "I'm still having a good time," he concluded. Having begun the album with an ode to "Music" and its potential for reforming the world, he ended with "Home in the Sky," in which he sang, "Music is a lady that I still love." Such statements of renewed commitment to his job added to the sense that the album was a conscious crafted as an attempted second wind for the singer, who had been recording and performing at a torrid pace since returning to the music business full-time four years before. But that was not to say, in everything from the album title to the song "Jesus," that he had abandoned the spiritual nature of his creative quest, and the songs were as usual littered with religious imagery.

Stevens' fans responded warmly to Buddha and the Chocolate Box's stylistic return to form. "Oh Very Young" became his first Top Ten hit since "Morning Has Broken" two years before, and the album was held out of #1 only by the soundtrack to The Sting, logging more than twice as many weeks in the Top Ten as Foreigner and as many as Catch Bull at Four, even if it fell short of Teaser and the Firecat. The album's tone, however, suggested that Stevens was once again wearying of being a pop star, even as he delivered a record that maintained that status. ~ William Ruhlmann

All Music Guide

While Foreigner was Cat Stevens' fifth consecutive gold album and his fourth straight Top Ten hit, it actually marked a small drop commercially and encountered critical resistance for the lengthy suite that took up all of side one. Eight months later, Buddha and the Chocolate Box found Stevens back in England and back with producer Paul Samwell-Smith and second guitarist Alun Davies. It also marked a return to the simpler style of earlier albums. No song ran much over five minutes, the arrangements were sparer and featured more acoustic guitar, and the lyrics did not take off into discursive ruminations about the state of the universe. It was very much as if Stevens was deliberately trying to make an album like Teaser and the Firecat, his commercial and artistic apex. Having begun the album with an ode to "Music" and its potential for reforming the world, he ended with "Home in the Sky," in which he sang, "Music is a lady that I still love." Such statements of renewed commitment added to the sense that the album was consciously crafted as an attempted second wind for the singer, who had been recording and performing at a torrid pace since returning to the music business full-time four years before. But that was not to say that he had abandoned the spiritual nature of his creative quest, and the songs were, as usual, littered with religious imagery. Stevens' fans responded warmly to Buddha and the Chocolate Box's stylistic return to form. "Oh Very Young" became his first Top Ten hit in two years, and the album was held out of number one only by The Sting. The album's tone, however, suggested that Stevens was once again wearying of being a pop star, even as he delivered a record that maintained that status. William Ruhlmann