Cat Stevens reminisces on his wild world at flawless show in Philly

At 68, Yusuf Islam, the artist better known as Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Steven Demetre Georgiou), has entered the taking-stock/legacy-curation chapter of his life, which explains why his current tour, nicknamed "A Cat's Attic," is sort of a live-action memoir with a classic, precision-rendered soundtrack.

Thursday night at the Kimmel Center, the stage set depicted the bifurcated attic of Stevens' home, looking out at the rooftops of London, beneath a gently smoking chimney, in the glow of a full moon. As Stevens sipped tea and poked through the dusty stacks of memory, he provided running commentary in between flawless renderings of iconic songs such as "Peace Train" and "Wild World" and deep cuts including "Here Comes My Baby" and "Matthew & Son" (at the end of which he gently ripped Tears For Fears for copping the song's bridge for the melody of their "Mad World").

The takeaway: there is more to Cat Stevens than is dreamed of in the 60 million albums of gentle bell-bottomed, folk-rock he sold.

Stevens has always been the proverbial seeker on a quest - first for fame, which came hot and heavy in the wake of early 1970s breakout albums such as Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat, then for enlightenment, which he found reading the Quran and converting to Islam after a near-death experience in Malibu, and lately trying to reconcile the two after 27 years of silence, for religious reasons, as a singer and songwriter. In 2014, Stevens did his first North American tour since 1976.

Bedecked in tinted spectacles, a white prophet's beard, and matching Caesar haircut, Stevens looked hale and lanky and his distinctive voice - a reedy, prismatic bleat that practically narrated the early '70s - remains blessedly intact despite nearly seven decades of service. Backed by pair of crack sidemen - guitarist Eric Appapoulay and multi-instrumentalist Kwame Yeboah - Stevens took a victory lap through embryonic hits such as "The First Cut Is the Deepest" and "I Love My Dog" and splendid misses such as "Miles From Nowhere" and "On the Road to Find Out."

In between, he spoke of the early influences - Tchaikovsky, West Side Story, Meet the Beatles - that guided his transition from thwarted art school Romeo to Aquarian Age playboy hitmaker. He recalled tours with Jimi Hendrix and Engelbert Humperdinck - with all the mind-blowing Dionysian excesses that implied - a bout with "that medieval disease" tuberculosis, dabbling in Buddhism, a business-side shake up, helming the soundtrack for Hal Ashby's mordant Nixon-era masterpiece Harold & Maude ("a sadistic little film which I kind of liked because I like to play tricks, too") and, at the dawn of the '70s, the beard-y, beatific hits that flowed like ambrosia and scored millions of late-night dorm-room bong sessions: "Oh Very Young," "Morning Has Broken," "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out," "Father and Son" (which garnered a standing ovation in the middle of the second set), and the aforementioned "Wild World" and "Peace Train."

"Thank you for being patient . . . for 27 years," Stevens told the adoring crowd. All in all, it was some enchanted evening, despite the tragic absence of "Moon Shadow" from the set list.