12 months of the Cat is the seventh studio album by Al Stewart, launched in 1976 and was produced and engineered by Alan Parsons; it’s thought-about his masterpiece, its gross sales helped by the hit single “12 months of the Cat”, “a type of ‘mysterious girl’ songs,” co-written by Peter Wooden. The opposite single from the album was “On the Border”. Stewart wrote “Lord Grenville” in regards to the Elizabethan sailor and explorer Sir Richard Grenville (1542–1591).
Stewart had the entire music and orchestration written and fully recorded earlier than he even had a title for any of the songs. In a Canadian radio interview he said that he has accomplished this for six of his albums, and he usually writes 4 completely different units of lyrics for every tune. The title monitor derives from a tune Stewart wrote in 1966 known as “Foot of the Stage” with prescient lyrics about Tony Hancock, certainly one of Britain’s favorite comedians who tragically dedicated suicide two years later. When Stewart found that Hancock was not well-known in the USA, he went again to his authentic title “12 months of the Cat”.
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