Most love songs begin with somebody found. “Hard Headed Woman” begins with somebody missing. “I’m looking for a hard headed woman,” Cat Stevens sings, in the second track on side one of Tea for the Tillerman — a woman who will take him for himself, make him do his best, make his life blessed. She does not exist yet, at least not in his life, and the whole song is a want ad written by a 22-year-old who had recently come close to dying and was rebuilding himself from the inside out. It is one of the warmest songs on one of the defining albums of the singer-songwriter era, and its story has an ending its author could not have imagined: fifty years later, he went back into the studio and changed the tense. The search, he announced, was over.
To understand why the song sounds so urgent, you have to know where Stevens had been. In 1969, at the height of his first fame as a Deram Records pop singer, he contracted tuberculosis and nearly died; the illness and the long convalescence that followed effectively ended his first career and started his second. Recovering, he wrote songs at a furious rate, signed to Island Records, and in April 1970 released Mona Bone Jakon, the hushed, searching record that introduced the “new” Cat Stevens. Seven months later came the album that made the transformation permanent. Most of its eleven songs had been written by a 22-year-old in and around Soho, in the West End streets where Stevens had grown up above his family’s restaurant — a young man taking stock of the city, the century and himself, and setting the audit to melodies of deceptive simplicity. Heard in sequence, the songs keep circling one question: in a world being rebuilt by money, machinery and speed, what should a person hold on to? “Hard Headed Woman” is where the album answers with a person rather than a principle.
An Album Recorded in a Hurry, Built to Last
Tea for the Tillerman, Stevens’ fourth studio album, was recorded between May and July 1970 at three London studios — Morgan, Island and Olympic — and released on 23 November 1970 by Island in Britain and A&M in North America. His producer was Paul Samwell-Smith, formerly of the Yardbirds, who understood that the songs needed air around them. The band was small and steady: Stevens himself on guitar, keyboards and vocals; Alun Davies, his musical shadow for the decade, on second guitar; John Ryan on double bass; Harvey Burns on drums. Del Newman supplied string arrangements on four tracks — and “Hard Headed Woman,” recorded in July 1970 at Morgan Studios, is one of them.
The album’s running order is part of its meaning. It opens with “Where Do the Children Play?”, a young man’s alarm at what the modern world is paving over. Then, before the hit single “Wild World” arrives at track three, the mood pivots inward: “Hard Headed Woman” is the album’s first love song, and its placement second in the sequence — side one, track two, 3 minutes 47 seconds — tells you that for Stevens the personal and the planetary were the same subject. A man asking who will share his life is asking the same question as a man asking what the world is becoming: what, exactly, is worth building on?
“One Who Will Take Me for Myself”
The lyric is structured as a series of job requirements, and they are notably unglamorous. The hard headed woman must take him as he is. She must make him do his best — a partner as conscience, not decoration. Later verses ask that she make him feel as he should, and promise that if she appears, the rest of his life will be blessed. In between, Stevens sketches the alternatives he is rejecting: the “fine feathered friends” whose friendliness depends on how you are doing, and the fancy dancers who know every sure-fired way to find out who pays. It is the testimony of a former pop idol who had watched fair-weather company evaporate during a year in and out of hospital, and had priced loyalty accordingly. Notice what the song is not. It is not a fantasy of glamour, and it is not a complaint about women; the hardness in the woman’s head is the whole point. Stevens is asking for an equal — someone stubborn enough to argue with him, unimpressed enough to see through the stage name, and strong enough to hold him to his own best intentions. In 1970, when rock’s love songs so often cast women as angels, groupies or witches, a hit album’s second track calmly requesting a partner with a mind of her own was its own quiet statement.
Musically the record dramatises the search. The verses are held, almost suspended — voice and guitar circling quietly — and then the choruses surge, Stevens pushing his voice up into the peaks that Rolling Stone‘s original reviewer Ben Gerson already noticed in 1970, remarking on the songs’ artfully simple lyrics and hooks while noting the singer’s dramatic use of dynamics. Newman’s strings widen the frame without softening it. The result is a folk song with a pulse: quiet enough to confess in, loud enough to believe.
And then there is the closing turn, the verse that lifts the song out of the personal altogether. Having searched the room for a partner, Stevens suddenly searches the age itself, wondering whether the new priests of science will one day presume to tell us when to live and when to die. It is the same anxiety that opens the album in “Where Do the Children Play?”, arriving here in miniature — and it is one reason the song has never dated. The want ad is for a woman; the worry is for everyone.
The Album Around It
Tea for the Tillerman was never carried by this track — it was not a single — but the album became a landmark. It reached No. 8 on the US Billboard 200 and No. 20 in the UK, and has since been certified triple platinum in the United States. AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann, in a five-star retrospective review, wrote that Stevens showed he had kept his gift as a pop melodicist while writing about spirituality and transcendence, and that “for the second time in four years, its creator became a pop star.” Rolling Stone placed the album at No. 205 on its 2020 revision of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Stevens, a former art student, even painted the sleeve himself: the tillerman’s tea party under a tree, one of the most recognisable covers of the era.
“Hard Headed Woman” travelled with the album through the culture — in Stevens’ concert sets (a 1974 Tokyo performance and a 1970 appearance on Germany’s Beat Club both surfaced on later editions), and in the muscle memory of everyone who ever dropped the needle on side one. But for half a century it remained, in one respect, unfinished. It was a song in the future tense.
Fifty Years Later, He Found Her
In September 2020, Yusuf — the name Stevens has performed under since returning to music after his decades away — released Tea for the Tillerman², a complete re-recording of the album for its fiftieth anniversary. The idea had come from a conversation with his son. Samwell-Smith returned to produce, Alun Davies returned on guitar, and the sessions were held at La Fabrique Studios in the south of France, near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence — the village where Vincent van Gogh, painting in an asylum in 1889, produced The Starry Night. For a songwriter who began as an art student and painted his own album cover, the geography was a quiet rhyme.
Most of the remakes keep their original words. “Hard Headed Woman” does not. In the 2020 version the opening line changes from a search to a report: “I’ve found my hard headed woman” — a change widely noted at the time and understood, as the singer acknowledged, to be about his wife. After fifty years, the want ad could be withdrawn. The rest of the song survives the update intact, its questions about science and mortality, if anything, sharper in 2020 than in 1970.
The anniversary editions added one more gift: the 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe release — five discs, a Blu-ray and a 12-inch vinyl of live recordings — included Stevens’ 1970 concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, complete with “Hard Headed Woman” as the young band played it weeks before the album appeared. Heard against the remake, the two versions bookend a life — the 22-year-old asking, the 72-year-old answering. Yusuf has described what the album means to him now in terms that explain why this song, of all of them, was the one whose words had to change: the songs on Tillerman, he said, “certainly defined me and pointed the way for my mysterious life’s journey.” A song about searching for the person who would define his life could hardly stay in the future tense once the journey had been lived.
That is why this modest album track, never a single and never the most famous song on its own record, rewards a closer look. Plenty of songs describe falling in love. Very few document, across fifty years and two recordings by the same man, the whole arc of looking for love and finding it. “Hard Headed Woman” began as a hope its singer phrased carefully enough to grow old inside. Most of us only get to sing the first version. Cat Stevens got to sing both.