Knowing what we do of Yusuf Islam's tentative return from self-imposed exile to the world of pop music over the past decade tells us much about his cautious nature.
Listening to the triple platinum album he recorded in 1970 as Cat Stevens tells us his uncertainty has been long held.
Tea For The Tillerman provides a compelling snapshot of the younger artist in turmoil.
Not turmoil of the raging, hair-tearing kind, but just as easily apparent and infinitely more revealing.
Stevens' discomfort with the direction his two-album career had been taking, propelled along by fast living and music-biz agendas that were not his own, had made him ill.
A year spent convalescing from the effects of tuberculosis and a collapsed lung gave him plenty of time for contemplation, and it changed the nature of his music.
Following up April 1970's Mona Bone Jakon seven months later with the similarly spare and intimate Tillerman, Stevens showed himself to be at a crossroads of another kind.
A quest for spiritual fulfilment had begun, one that would ultimately lead to his conversion to Islam in 1977.
Tillerman's restless soul dwells on the journey rather than the destination, although in On The Road To Find Out he knows the answer lies within, saying "kick out the Devil's sin and pick up a good book now".
That's a good book, not the good book.
However, earlier track Miles From Nowhere makes it clear he won't be rushed into corralling his newfound sense of freedom.
Where Do The Children Play? shows Stevens to be just as troubled by humankind's prospects as his own, while Father And Son documents the tensions between the aspirations of one generation and another.
And when Hard Headed Woman, Wild World and Sad Lisa address questions of romantic love, the gamut of tricky topics is run.
Tough questions all, but framed in a beguilingly mellow way.
