Tea for the Tillerman
1970 studio album by Cat Stevens
Tea for the Tillerman is the fourth studio album by British-born singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, released on 23 November 1970 by Island Records in the United Kingdom and A&M in North America. Recorded between May and July of 1970 at three studios in London (Morgan, Island, and Olympic), it features some of Stevens's most iconic and best-known songs including the singles "Wild World" and "Father and Son". Numerous of its songs have been featured in films, including "But I Might Die Tonight" for the Jerzy Skolimowski film Deep End. It reached the top 10 in the US and the top 20 in the UK, and is now considered one of the greatest albums of all time by several publications.
Overview
Tea for the Tillerman includes many of Stevens's best-known songs such as "Where Do the Children Play?", "Hard Headed Woman", "Wild World", "Sad Lisa", "Into White", and "Father and Son". Stevens, a former art student, created the artwork featured on the record's cover.
In November 2008, a "Deluxe Edition" was released featuring a second disc of demos and live recordings. In January 2012, a hi-res 24/192 kHz version was remastered using an Ampex ATR100 and a MSB Technology Studio ADC and released on HDtracks.com.
Fifty years after the original album's release, in September 2020, Stevens remade the album as Tea for the Tillerman2, including new lyrics and new instrumentation, and he sings along with his 22-year-old self in "Father and Son". That same year, Tea for the Tillerman was re-released as a 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tea for the Tillerman” is 1970 studio album by Cat Stevens. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tillerman, studio and album, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1970 studio album by Cat Stevens” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1077486. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 2008, 2012 and 2020.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tea for the Tillerman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.