Cat Stevens' Best-Charting Single In 1972 Was Originally Just 40 Seconds Long

Back in his early-1970s heyday, Cat Stevens never had a song reach higher than the No. 6 slot, and the singer-songwriter did that with "Morning Has Broken," a song that, in its original format, didn't even run an entire minute. One of the few songs Stevens recorded that he didn't originate, "Morning Has Broken" was recorded for the musician's 1971 album "Teaser and the Firecat." In a beautiful, touching, and gentle meditation, Stevens salutes the new day at dawn, showing thanks and praise for the chance to live life surrounded by casually wonderful and profound things like rain, dew, sunlight, and birds.

There's a lot going on in the song, and a large enough audience felt a deep enough connection with it that they made it one of Stevens' biggest-ever hits, but at first there wasn't enough of "Morning Has Broken" to build a substantial pop song. Stevens had to bring in extra help to rearrange, revamp, and just plain stretch out the brief "Morning Has Broken" before it could become a classic of the folk-inspired singer-songwriter era of the 1970s.

Before he set out to record "Teaser and the Firecat," Cat Stevens was lacking in material until he discovered "Morning Has Broken," a hymn written by English author and poet Eleanor Farjeon in 1931 to "Bunessan," a Gaelic melody from the 1880s. "It was quite a traditional song sung in the church, and I just did my own arrangement," Stevens told Billboard. "I fell in love with the melody and the words."

The key figure in transforming "Morning Has Broken" was Rick Wakeman, part of the band Yes, with whom the keyboardist would record albums that defined prog rock. Wakeman would flee his band to play keyboards with other mega-successful artists, but he was in the studio complex when Stevens was trying to record "Morning Has Broken." Stevens asked for some piano pizazz, but he'd need more than that. "He said, the only problem is it's only 40 seconds long, which is a bit short for a single," Wakeman recalled at a speaking engagement in 2019.

Wakeman suggested that Stevens reprise the first verse and then repeatedly use Wakeman's majestic piano intro throughout, along with multiple key changes. "Cat Stevens stuck his vocals on the top and that was it," Wakeman said. The official running time of "Morning Has Broken": three minutes and 10 seconds. That was plenty for a single, and it hit the Top 10 in the U.S. and the U.K.