The following are some of the edited version of Yusuf's interview with CNN:
CNN: Can you tell us about the musical?
Yusuf: It's not quite a mirror of my life. I've taken the liberty of extending it into a fable-like, spiritual story about a boy, who like many boys -- like me -- had a dream of wanting to find something he didn't have. In this world that we've created, it's permanent night time, there's only a moon and there's no days. This boy has dreamed of finding a world where there's sunshine, light and heat. It's kind of like paradise. I've integrated that kind of story in with my songs. A lot of songs are about seeking that place ... an intangible place, which usually are about finding, not the outer world, but the inner world.
CNN: Why did you abandon your pop career in the 1970s?
Yusuf: I tried any times to get out of it. I was hit by a bout of tuberculosis which took me away from the music world that I'd just entered and then things got bigger and more successful. I tried to find out where I really wanted to go at certain points in my life: I studied different spiritual paths; I was a vegetarian and I studied meditation. At certain points I tried to get out of the machine but I didn't really know where I wanted to go. But when I got finally to learn a few things about Islam, to me it was a missing piece of the puzzle. A lot of people overlook it. Perhaps they're looking at the wrong kind of picture of Islam, but they don't see what I see, which is an amazing conversion of what I believed as a Christian, what I read in the Bible, and what I understood about Transcendental Meditation. It all came together in a religion which wasn't really a religion as such, more a spiritual path -- so that made a big impact on me.
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