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October 31st, 2026 · 8:52pm GMT
The entire career arc of Rod Stewart feels like something out of some perverse rock and roll fairy tale.
Sure, he has had his ups and downs just like every other singer of his time, but the idea of someone making it from being an unknown singer to being discovered by Long John Baldry and eventually getting to work with some of the greatest musicians that the rock world has ever seen feels like whatever the rock and roll equivalent of Cinderella is, to a certain degree. Stewart was only too happy to enjoy the ride half the time, but after a while, there came a point where he had more to say than the typical hard rock he was being asked to sing.
Some of the greatest musicians in The Faces were bound to be enough for him to become a star when singing ‘Stay With Me’ for the first time, but Stewart was not going to say no to someone like Jeff Beck if he could help it. Here was one of the best guitarists that the world had ever known, and being able to play with him for a few seconds would have been enough for any other player, let alone spending years out on the road with him.
Stewart did end up seeing the ugly side of what the touring life was like with Beck, but he felt that there was so much more for him to work on without standing in anyone’s shadow. He was too scared to even show his face when he first started singing in America, but when you look at the journey that he took to make records like Every Picture Tells a Story, everything made a lot more sense when he was just being himself.
The whole point of that record was to get him out of his comfort zone, and when you think about the massive songs that he sang on Truth or Beck-Ola, seeing him adopt a folksy demeanour wasn’t the first thing that most people latched onto. Everyone expected Stewart to stay purely in rock and roll territory, but all it took was the sound of a song like ‘Maggie May’ to get everyone on the same page with him again.
Stewart was trying his best to make music that sounded more authentic, and despite claiming that his biggest hit didn’t have any melody, the rest of the world begged to differ when they heard him sing it for the first time. This was the kind of sleazy rock and roll tune that anyone could get down with, but Stewart felt that some of the real gems in his catalogue were some of the deeper cuts on the album.
There were certainly moments where he could go out of his comfort zone, but ‘Mandolin Wind’ was the kind of tune that he saw as a cut above everything else he played, saying, “I believe it to be one of my finest efforts, written in Muswell Hill, North London, in 1969 – a long, long way away from the buffalo and Great Plains of America that the song depicts. It just shows you what a little imagination can do when writing songs. Acoustic guitar by Martin Quittenton deserves merit.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And when it comes to pure Americana, you can really see what Stewart is talking about. There are so many people that might not have been able to pull off something like this, but in the age of the singer-songwriter, Stewart was reserving himself a place at the table right next to other beautiful song interpreters like James Taylor and Van Morrison whenever he opened his mouth to sing this tune.
It wasn’t the most complicated song in the world or anything, but you can see more of the history that Stewart loved about music in every word that he sang. ‘Mandolin Wind’ didn’t need to be a classic hit or anything, because as far as he was concerned, he had already laid down one of the greatest tunes that anyone would hear from him.
