Past, Present & Future by Al Stewart

Past, Present and Future, Al Stewart's fifth album, came out in Britain in October 1973 on CBS, with America catching up the following May, and it's the record where the bedsit folkie turns history professor. Stewart called his first four albums an apprenticeship and this one his thesis, and the concept is a brainy one: each song stands for a decade of the 20th century, with the closing "Nostradamus" reaching back to the old seer and his prophecies.

The folkier approach of his early work gives way to a broader sweep he'd hold on to for most of his career, and "Roads to Moscow" and the advance single "Terminal Eyes" show how far he'd come. It was his first album to be treated as a major work, and it is still held up as a truer example of his intimate story-songs about history than the platinum smashes that followed. He played it in full at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2015, on the same night as Year of the Cat.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.