(Credits: Far Out / Allan Warren)
Mon 16 February 2026 8:00, UK
There are hardly any singers who can make any genre sound great like Rod Stewart could.
He may have been born to play the same kind of boozy rock and roll that he did back in the day with The Faces, but whether he’s going into pop territory or making some of the more unfashionable career decisions anyone has ever made, his voice is the one thing that survives every single switchup he’s ever made. But that doesn’t mean that Stewart hasn’t loved a few genres a little more than others whenever he takes the stage.
Then again, Stewart has said numerous times that he would have been with The Faces forever had he had the chance. That bluesy form of rock and roll is what he cut his teeth on back in the day, and considering Ronnie Wood is more like a brother to him these days, it would have made sense for him to keep singing tunes like ‘Stay With Me’ had songs like ‘Maggie May’ not taken off as they did.
But that also means we wouldn’t have got the massive hits that he had once he started making his way through the 1980s. A lot of the biggest singer-songwriters of the 1970s didn’t manage to survive the transition into the world of music videos, but Stewart could rely on that raspy voice of his to carry him through even the toughest times. It wasn’t everyone’s first choice to put a synthesiser behind him, but ‘Forever Young’ and ‘Young Turks’ are still among the finest pop songs he has ever made.
And it’s also about time someone has admitted a cold, hard truth: ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ isn’t that bad. It’s one of the more blatant examples of an artist selling out, and Stewart himself would have told you that he was in over his head when he made the tune, but for a hybrid of old-school rock and roll and disco, it certainly kicks the ass of anything The Stones were putting out when they tried to wrangle in the Saturday Night Fever crowd.
But like any other rock star, there comes a point where Stewart was going to need to slow things down a little bit. The reason why so many of those blues tunes worked was hearing that youthful voice, and once he started to get a little bit more comfortable with his lower register, diving into the Great American Songbook wasn’t the worst idea in the world when Stewart discovered the easy listening crowd.
The blues would always be a part of his musical identity, but when asked about his favourite genre of music to sing, Stewart had no problem calling swing music his first true musical love, saying, “Without a doubt, without a doubt. You know, it’s not easy to sing and I find it easy, but you can’t imagine Van Morrison doing it. Oh sorry, Van, I love you mate! But look, it’s a style that not many people can pull off and it has to be done naturally, this kind of music.”
Those tunes weren’t going to exactly earn him any credibility with people who wanted him to break out the electric guitars and rock out again, but that’s not how Stewart thought about music. He wanted the chance to make the best music that he could, regardless of genre, and it’s not shocking that many other rock stars followed his lead, like Paul McCartney making Kisses on the Bottom at the turn of the 2010s.
Some fans were bound to be disappointed seeing one of the best blues singers of all time become a crooner, but it wasn’t all that different from what Stewart had been doing back in the day. He could sing anything that he thought would suit his voice, and while not every one of the songs was going to be a barnburner or anything, there was nothing that ended up on record that didn’t have the same passion that he sang with when he was still playing bar gigs with The Faces.