Yusuf / Cat Stevens has announced a new remastered edition of his 1974 album Buddha and the Chocolate Box. It arrives September 4, and comes in a variety of formats, including digital, CD, and two vinyl colorways.
Buddha and the Chocolate Box reunited the musician with two longtime collaborators, producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies. The pair’s return steered the sound back toward the warmer, more intimate style that had defined his biggest albums earlier in the decade. The record’s title nodded to the singer’s own description of feeling torn between competing spiritual paths at the time.
“Buddha and the Chocolate Box reopened the doors of my familiar melodious soft delivery and sentiments,” Yusuf wrote in his 2025 memoir, Cat On the Road to Findout. “Although still experimental in compositional terms, it was what most of my fans desperately wanted to hear next. Following on from Foreigner, the Buddha album proved – especially to those who had no faith – that the missing Cat had simply wandered away from home for a while. My principle of independence was asserted as with most cats, don’t ever dare think you own them! As far as the critics were concerned, album-wise, it marked my heralded return to ‘Cat Stevens’ form.”
The album went platinum stateside, and was internationally popular, reaching No. 2 in the US and No. 3 in Britain. In particular, “Oh Very Young” cracked the American top ten on release and resurfacing commercially last year after being used in the closing scene of Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club, which sent the decades-old track back onto UK sales charts.
The new pressing of Buddha and the Chocolate Box compiles nine tracks, including “Music,” “Sun / C79,” “Ghost Town,” and “Home in the Sky,” and follows a recent run of archival projects from the singer, including a live recording from Tokyo and a hits compilation. The latter. titled On the Road to Findout: Greatest Hits, came out last September and pulled selections from across nearly six decades, stretching from his 1967 debut up through 2023’s King of a Land.
