Cat Stevens’ “I Love My Dog”: The Story Behind His First Single

In 1966 a teenage Londoner walked into a record label with a love song that ranked his dog above the girl he was singing to. The label signed him. Cat Stevens’ “I Love My Dog” became his first single, and it is still one of the few pop songs where the dog flatly wins.

What “I Love My Dog” is actually about

The whole conceit is a comparison. Stevens tells the person he loves that he loves them as much as his dog, then quietly admits the catch: people fade, the dog never does. It is a young songwriter noticing that the most reliable love in the house had four legs. A cat, of all surnames, singing the case for the dog.

The dachshund behind the song

The dog was real. Stevens wrote the song with his family’s dachshund, Pepe, in mind. Animals stayed central to his life long after the hits stopped: as Yusuf Islam, the name he took in 1977, he has spent decades backing animal-welfare causes. “I Love My Dog” reads less like a novelty and more like the first public sign of who he already was.

The melody he had to pay for

Here is the part most people miss. Stevens built the tune on “The Plum Blossom,” a 1961 piece by the American jazz multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef. Lateef’s lawyers noticed in 1966 and complained. Decades later, Stevens, by then Yusuf Islam, credited Lateef on a box set and made it right. Two Yusufs, one melody, and a dog song that quietly owed its sound to a jazz record.

Stevens found his muse in a dachshund. A surprising number of great songs started exactly that way. See where “I Love My Dog” lands among the best songs about dogs. And if the song just made you want one, please adopt, don’t shop.