The Glasgow, Scotland-born singer-songwriter suddenly found himself a star at age 31. More hits followed, but by 1980, they dried up. He has continued recording, off and on, well into the new century, and his hits are standards of oldies radio.

If nobody cared about him anymore, then there would be no use for a series of reissues slated for October and November. Al Stewart, indeed, still does matter. His knack for words, so obvious in his historically driven songs, is just as obvious in a Labor Day phone interview with Pause & Play.

He's witty, gracious, open and honest ... and refreshingly self-deprecating. He's an instant charmer, as you can read for yourself:

PAUSE & PLAY: Tomorrow (Sept. 5) is your 61st birthday.

STEWART: "That's true. I hadn't planned anything for it, and I probably won't do anything today either (laughing). Everything's closed anyway."

P&P: Happy birthday. My father-in-law is turning 60 in November, and he's having a hard time with it. How did you handle it?

STEWART: "Oh, I think 60's easy. It was 30 I didn't like. My whole philosophy about it is it's bonus-time. Once you turn 60, no one takes even the remotest bit of interest in anything you do or say. It's carte blanche, really, to be 10 again or maybe 12. So it's like a second childhood, in a way.

"At 30, you have a responsibility to live up to some sort of idea you have about what you want to achieve in life. By 60, it doesn't matter anymore."

P&P: It's funny you should mention 30. That's how old you were when your career really took off.

STEWART: "There's so much effort involved in it, so much insecurity, trying to make records that you just don't know if anyone's going to like them. The pressure is on. You've got record companies shouting at you; managers shouting at you. Agents booking you on insane tours that you physically cannot do. And you're running around in circles all the time. It's so incredibly difficult.

"At 60, if the phone rings once every two or three days, that's busy. I'm surprised when the phone rings; I sort of forget what it sounds like."

P&P: Do you think people have forgotten about you?

STEWART: "In October and November, I'll play 25 shows in Europe. I obviously don't think people have forgotten about me, otherwise I wouldn't be out on the road so much. I do think that in America that radio stations have forgotten about me a little bit, because they don't tend to play my new stuff."

P&P: Commercial radio may not play you, but thanks to Internet radio, I've been able to discover some of your older material, particularly "Roads to Moscow."

STEWART: (laughing) "Better late than never. If you come to see my show, I sing the damn thing almost every night. I never should have made that song that long."

P&P: Yeah, it's a good thing you don't do that 18-minute track from (the 1969 album) "Love Chronicles."

STEWART: "Yeah (laughing). It's weird, actually. I was watching The History Channel last night, which I'm prone to do, and my songs seem to come back to me from all different angles. It's weird. There was an hourlong documentary on Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA (Nazi Sturmabteilung) who was killed on the last day of June 1934. I wrote a song exactly that (laughing) (from 'Past Present and Future'). I'm looking at this show and it's like my song coming back to life again. It's so bizarre.

"This happens with great regularity. Even 'On the Border' ... 'The hand that sets the farms alight/Has spread the word to those who're waiting on the border' ... was from when I had read about Rhodesia. Now 30 or 35 years after the event, Robert Mugabe's henchmen are setting the farms alight and chasing the poor people over the border.

"Either history keeps going round and round in circles or my songs are extremely prescient. I think it's probably the former."

P&P: There's still a lot of interest in your music, obviously. In Britain next month, EMI is reissuing "Famous Last Words" (1993) and releasing a best-of, "A Piece of Yesterday." And Rhino is putting out a two-CD collection in November.

STEWART: "Yes, last year they released a box set, with I think five CDs, called 'Just Yesterday.' I guess this is a sort of slimmed-down version. It's really just a two-CD version of the box set.

"It seems every time I go there (Britain, for a tour), they repackage something and put it out again. And last year I think it was, Rhino reissued 'Year of the Cat,' 'Time Passages' and a 'Greatest Hits.' So my music keeps reappearing, which I suppose is charming. I released a new one last year called 'A Beach Full of Shells,' and it's actually one of my favorite records that I've made in my entire career. So I'd be more appreciative of people buying that one than replacing copies of 'Year of the Cat.' "

P&P: Let's go to the beginning. Is it true you were flatmates with Paul Simon and Sandy Denny in the '60s?

STEWART: "Going back to 1923, it seems everybody around the English folk scene knew each other. There weren't that many places to play so everybody played in the same place, a little club called Les Cousins on the West End of London. I got there in '65 when I was 19 and saw Bert Jansch playing, and I had never seen anyone play a guitar like that. I was a habitue of the place; I was probably there every night.

"Paul Simon used to play down there, and Sandy Denny, she later became the lead singer of Fairport Convention. Everybody was there. Cat Stevens used to play there, before he was Cat Stevens, of course. Van Morrison had a residency every Tuesday and even Jimi Hendrix came in and played. Pretty much the whole world passed through that little West End club.

"For a while, it was my job to put people on the stage and take them off. Somewhere along the line, I started writing songs. I had left school and decided I wanted to be the English Bob Dylan and there were like 50 other candidates for the job. (Laughing.) So we all congregated in this club and tried to learn how to do it. I should say that I managed to share an apartment with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel for about four months, so living next to Paul I got a firsthand entree into how to write songs. I just watched him do it and he'd come out and play for me what he had just written because I was the only one around."

P&P: So who won the Dylan job in Britain?

STEWART: "It's hard to tell. When you look back on it, I don't think anybody really wanted the Bob Dylan job, but we were all trying. Roy Harper could do a pretty good Dylan. Actually, when I said 50 people were applying for the job, I think that's actually a quote from Marc Bolan.

"I was the first person in England to sing (Dylan's) 'Desolation Row.' It was released in England on a Friday, and that day, I went to two clubs on the West End and sang it, and I'm pretty convinced I gave the first performance ever in Europe of 'Desolation Row.' I had gotten the record a couple days early and got myself in a room for two days and memorized it. When I said we were trying to be Bob Dylan, I mean exactly that. Nobody goes out and sings 'Desolation Row' on the day it's released unless they're really fanatical."

P&P: You were also the first mainstream artist to use the F-word in a song, on "Love Chronicles."

STEWART: "It was from that long song. Most people use that word as an insult. I used it to describe sexual intercourse, and I used it in the present participle (laughing). There was no other real way to say what I was trying to say. I mean, the song was 18 minutes long, and it came at the end of it. People with mild dispositions would have switched off long before it came around, so I don't think it was a real problem."

P&P: Is that why it got past CBS, the song was too long and they didn't listen to it all?

STEWART: "They kept scheduling (the song) for release and canceling it, so I'm not sure if it actually did come out. I know they pressed it, but I don't think it ever reached the charts. In England, ('Love Chronicles') became the Folk Album of the Year. It had Jimmy Page playing on it and Richard Thompson. It did very well in England."

P&P: Most people, at least in America, think you were an overnight success with "Year of the Cat," but you already had a foot in the door with FM radio with "Past Present and Future" (1974) and "Modern Times" (1975), which went to No. 30 on the Billboard chart.

STEWART: "You've done your research. It's interesting that 30 years ago I had a record on the charts called 'Modern Times,' and the person I was copying, Mr. Dylan, has just released an album titled 'Modern Times.' I kid people that my next album is going to be called 'Highway 61 Revisited.' Actually, I think Dylan called the title from the same place I did, from Charlie Chaplin."

P&P: Anyway, people who listened to AM radio didn't know who you were.

STEWART: "No, and they still don't. People in those days, the music lovers, listened to FM radio. AM was just something you had on in the kitchen and they weren't paying a great deal of attention, or you'd drive around in your car, thinking about the groceries. Whereas in 1975, people listening to FM were pretty geeky about it. They listened to everything and bought it and knew everything."

P&P: It must've been a shock to you to get that high on the chart (before "Year of the Cat") with no AM airplay.

STEWART: "But ('Modern Times') was my sixth album. Every one had sold better than the one before, so it wasn't that much of a shock. The first album sold like 3,000 copies, the second one did about 20,000, by the fifth one we had done like 75,000 and then 'Modern Times' 150,000-200,000. By the time we released 'Year of the Cat,' if you put this all on a graph, it seemed to me that the sheer momentum and logic would have made it a Top 20 album. But, of course, it had a hit single on it and that made it a Top 10 album.

"It all built slowly, I think perhaps because of the complexity of the songs. It wasn't one of those pop careers where it all goes up very quickly. As I said, you could put this thing on a graph and you could see where it was all going, that sooner or later we were going to get a hit (laughing). It just happened to be in 1976, 10 years later."

P&P: When you finished that album ('Year of the Cat'), did you think, "Wow, this is the one"?

STEWART: "I thought it was pretty good. I had finished it at 9 o'clock in the morning and I was living in an apartment in West Hollywood and I had been in the studio all night with Alan Parsons mixing this thing. And I brought it back and I couldn't go to bed. I had not heard it on my home system; it's one thing to listen to a record in a studio because everything sounds great through big speakers, but I wanted to listen to it through tiny little speakers. I remember putting it on at 9 in the morning for one more time, then around 10 in the morning I thought 'This sounds pretty damn good' and I went to sleep."

P&P: Did your life change overnight?

STEWART: "Actually, my life didn't change at all. The record was so expensive to make, and because of all the promo tours we did, I think it personally cost me a quarter of a million dollars. You had to pay the record company back, you had to pay the producer. It worked out that years later, during the period when I was having successful records, I basically broke even on the entire thing. Whereas years later, when I was just going out with an acoustic guitar and wasn't really doing records anymore, you make money. So go figure.

"The overheads are so insane. At one point, we took like 28 people to Japan. You have to pay them all, feed them all, put them all in hotels. In Japan, we might have sold, I don't know, maybe 15,000 albums, the trip probably cost huge multiples of that. The record company says 'Go to Japan,' so we went to Japan. I don't regret doing it, but as any band who has toured will tell you, the worst thing that can happen to you is to have a hit because your expenses go straight off the chart. A quick way to go bankrupt."

P&P: People assume that's when an artist starts making a ton of money.

STEWART: "No, that's when you start losing money (laughing). When I was playing in England being a folk singer, I didn't have any overhead. I'd put the guitar in the back of the car, drive to the university wherever it was and they paid me 100 pounds or whatever it was and 90 pounds of that was profit. And I was living fairly modestly, so that was all great. Then you come to America, you make $5,000 for a show and it cost you $10,000 to do it. (Laughing.) And that's not the way to make money.

"When I think back to all the bands in the '70s, they were all in the same situation. Now, you can get a little machine the size of a small box and it can make any kind of keyboard noise that you want. In the '70s, we had a road crew and it was like hauling Hammond organs up and down flights of stairs, because you had to have them. And huge speakers and lighting systems. The huge scale of the thing, it becomes a military expedition."

P&P: At least you didn't have a laser show like Blue Oyster Cult.

STEWART: "True, but I had a slide show for 'Roads to Moscow,' showing scenes from World War II. We used to call it the Hitlergrams. When I sang the line 'Gen. Guderian stands at the crest of the hill,' there'd be a big picture of Gen. Guderian behind me."

P&P: Wow, multimedia.

STEWART: "It was very impressive .. and very expensive. We got them from the Imperial War Museum in London. I remember doing a show in Munich in the 1970s and this picture of Adolf Hitler comes up on the screen and people got very upset about it. Several people walked out."