King of Trees

Anyone knows what does this song mean?

zomg cat stevens^!!!

This song is so sad. I think it's about a tree, and not just any tree...the king of trees and it was willy nilly chopped down to make a stupid road. This makes me sad because it happens all the time. We just don't see what is truly important.

Could be metaphor for his childhood. The 'tree' could be his father. Just a thought; with Cat, there's always something deeper. What a poet!

So this is a very blunt interpretations but no one else seems to be offering anything

The song follows a boy who grows up around the tree's and nature but as time passes he begins to drift from the tree's and years later returns to the forest he once called his friend only to cut it down building a highway through it and using the lumber for warmth

This view goes along with some of the other things Islam has written about especially on the album Tea for the Tillerman with themes of growing up like in "Father And Son" and of the industrial destruction of nature from "Where do the children play"

Here's my take on it.

The tree is a place where a man an old love used to meet; to get away from the city, the noise, and just enjoy each other's company. Under this tree, he learned real love, probably for the first time.

Now, many years have passed, and all the man has of that love is just the tree's presence to serve as a reminder. And now, even the tree's about to be gone.

'Now they've come to cut you down'--the anonymous 'they,' from the 'hustling town,' now encroaching on the 'forest and the evergreens' from which they've severed themselves and no longer understand or respect, to the extent that they can casually 'burn the leaves.'

The artist desires a return to 'days we held the same;' i.e., the good old days when he and his young friends saw eye to eye and understood each other. At first he sounds bravely confident he isn't simply indulging in nostalgia: 'The forest and the evergreens are coming to take me back.' But he knows better, and the lyric quickly becomes a plea: 'Please take me back'--I'm begging you.

'Now they've come to lay the road,' and there's no stopping them. The final line is a plea, too: 'Don't lay the road;' i.e., don't go in that direction. You're heading completely the wrong way, not back to nature but ahead to a desolate future in which even the 'king of trees' can be cut down, sacrificed to a road to nowhere. It's a hopeless cry of despair.

Knowing that Cat Stevens was going through a religious soul searching around this time, along with the religious music arrangements, I always thought of this as a disciple to Jesus song. The first verse of “we used to meet by him, far from the hustling town refers to the pre Jerusalem ministry, The “now we come to cut you down” being the Peter denying he knew Jesus. He last verse of “lay the road” meaning the ministry of Peter. Anyway, whatever the meaning, the song does move me in the manner of a religious song

I just think it's about our relationship with nature, we love the forest and rainforest but continue to destroy them due to progress and financial gain. It could also be related to the children's story 'The Giving Tree', about nature sacrificing itself to us in order to help us survive, apples to sell, wood to build.