I was very frustrated, but now you listen to it and you hear the charm, because I was not self-conscious.” He also confesses that when he heard actress Ruth Gordon, who played Maude, warble “If You Want to Sing Out” onscreen, he “was a little bit upset by the fact that she wasn’t singing it ‘right.’ … I was, you know, ‘professional.’ So, I didn’t want to do the demo. “I was getting ready to do it properly - you know, go in with the musicians and do this thing professionally. Yusuf admits that he hadn’t expected his demo of the latter song to end up in the film, and at first he wasn’t too pleased about that. Yusuf did eventually compose two originals for Harold & Maude: “Don’t Be Shy,” which played during one of Harold’s shocking fake-suicide scenes, and “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,” which was performed by the titular couple in one of the film’s sweetest and most whimsical scenes. “So, it was a kind of fait accompli that we had to make a deal - and we did, of course.” When I came to San Francisco to see some of the rushes, Hal Ashby, the director, had already sort of his filled the whole film with my music!” he recalls. “The whole process of making the film actually embedded my music from the very beginning. Yusuf stresses that while he thought it was “kind of great” that Ashby made what Yusuf considered to be “just a long music video” for his music, he had no idea that would be the case until Harold and Maude was always well on its way to completion. And I said, ‘I’m too young to have a greatest hits!” Yusuf tells Yahoo Entertainment with a chuckle. They were using so much of my two albums, Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, that ended up to be a greatest hits. “I refused to allow them to make a soundtrack album. That album, featuring both Yusuf’s music and dialogue from the film, will finally come out on Feb.
And yet, there has never been an official soundtrack release - until now. The use of the legendary singer-songwriter Cat Stevens/Yusuf’s music in the cult-classic film is on par with Simon & Garfunkel’s in The Graduate or Elliott Smith’s in Good Will Hunting, with the songs often speaking for the characters. This month marks the 50th anniversary of Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby’s dark coming-of-age comedy about a romance between a death-obsessed man in his early twenties and a fun-loving 79-year-old woman.