Mona Bone Jakon is the third studio album by singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, released in April 1970 on the Island Records label in the United Kingdom and on A&M in the United States and Canada. Overview After a meteoric start to his career, surprising even his original producer at Deram Records with the hit singles "I Love My Dog", "Matthew and Son", and "I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun", Stevens' debut album, Matthew and Son, began charting. However, after the pressure for a repeat album of the same calibre, Stevens, considered a young teen sensation, was overwhelmed by a new lifestyle as well as the demands of writing, recording, performing, publicity appearances, and touring. His second album was a commercial failure and in the autumn of 1968, he was hospitalized, with a diagnosis of tuberculosis and a collapsed lung. For over a year, while recovering, Stevens virtually disappeared from the British pop scene. Mona Bone Jakon is notable not only for his return but for the emergence of a very different artist. The album sold slowly (at first) but over time has been certified Gold for sales/shipments of more than 500,000 copies in the United States. Background During his hospital-dictated year of bedrest, Stevens began writing a catalogue of songs to fill far more than his next album. After his recovery, he negotiated out of his contract with Deram Records and worked with former Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith on a stripped-down sound. In contrast to his first two albums, these new songs were sparse arrangements. They were played on acoustic guitars and keyboards and accompanied by a smaller backing band, consisting of three other performers: second guitarist Alun Davies, bassist John Ryan, and drummer Harvey Burns—and on one song, "Katmandu", Peter Gabriel on the flute. Samwell-Smith also produced the album and brought Stevens a high-fidelity sound that was not as present on his previous releases. Samwell-Smith was one of the early producers in rock to push the lower bass frequencies more prominently into the mix in an attempt to keep up with the new audiophile generation, which was embracing larger home speakers and high-end phonographic cartridges. Stevens began to make the transition from pop musician to a folk-rock performer when the term "singer-songwriter" was just being coined. The songs themselves were darker in tone: the madrigal-inspired ballad "Lady D'Arbanville" elevated the tragedy of a lost lover (in this case, Stevens' former