Emma Stone: 1970 Cat Stevens song helped her darkest days
Emma Stone has credited Cat Stevens’ 1970 folk classic “Where Do The Children Play?” with helping her through one of the hardest periods of her life. After discovering the track via the film Harold and Maude, the Oscar-winning actress said the song was soothing while her mother faced breast cancer when Stone was 19.
Key Takeaways
- Emma Stone called Cat Stevens’ “Where Do The Children Play?” formative during a family health crisis.
- She first fell for the song through Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude.
- In a British Vogue conversation, she described the track as sad, soothing, and “kind of the perfect song.”
- Stone’s career has also crossed into musicals, including her Oscar-winning turn in La La Land.
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Which 1970 song helped Emma Stone?
According to Far Out Magazine, the track is Cat Stevens’ “Where Do The Children Play?”—the opening song on his album Tea for the Tillerman.
The folk-rock number asks what progress costs, weighing planes, petrol, and modern change against the question of where children still get to play. Its calm tone and open-ended lyric leave room for personal meaning, which is part of why it has lasted.
Why did the Cat Stevens track matter so much to her?
Stone told British Vogue she was listening to a lot of Cat Stevens when her mum had breast cancer and she was 19. “This song for some reason was very helpful and effective and soothing, because it’s sad but it’s also just kind of the perfect song,” she said. “It was very formative in that time in my life. I really loved that song.”
That blend of melancholy and comfort is what stuck. Far Out notes that the arrangement never overpowers the message, offering calm inside difficult feelings rather than easy answers.
How did Emma Stone first discover the song?
She found it through Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and immediately connected with the soundtrack. More than a decade on, the Stevens cut remains the one that seems to have stayed with her.
Though best known for acting, Stone has often stepped into music on screen—from a comedy cut with The Lonely Island in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping to Damien Chazelle’s romantic musical La La Land, where she starred opposite Ryan Gosling and won an Oscar.
Kurt Loder’s Creators Syndicate review of La La Land highlights how Stone’s musical performance work, including a spellbinding audition-number sequence sung live on set, showed how far her screen singing can go. That public musical side sits alongside a quieter personal soundtrack: a 1970 folk song that, by her own account, helped carry her through her darkest moments.