The songwriter Rod Stewart called his all-time favourite: “Wonderful lyricist”
Rock and roll doesn’t have to revolve around the lyrics. It might help when someone can write with the same passion and fury as Bob Dylan, but there have also been thousands of songs that have resulted in nothing but absolute nonsense that still manages to get people raising their fists in the air. Although Rod Stewart could reasonably read the contents of what he had for breakfast every morning and have crowds eating out of the palm of his hand, he knew that there were some avenues that people hadn’t gone down.
When he first started, Stewart could have easily done fine singing nothing but blues covers throughout his career. His time with the Jeff Beck Group had some of the best moments of his early days, and even though the Faces got swallowed up by his solo career half the time, it was important for him to hold onto his roots as a blues musician who could churn out a Howlin’ Wolf song in between singing hits like ‘Stay With Me’.
But once he started turning towards folksy music, it sounded like he finally understood the meaning behind a good lyric. He was never going to embrace his inner Dylan by adopting that nasal delivery, so the best way for him to work was to make something honest that his fans could relate to. Not everyone may have had the same experience as the person in ‘Maggie May’, but if they managed to believe it as Stewart did, that was more than enough.
Although Stewart continued to be one of the biggest names in rock and roll into the 1980s, he didn’t exactly get off clean, either. He managed to get tunes like ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ on the charts, but no one would respect someone who traded their shoes for disco platform boots. He needed to find a better outlet, and that meant pulling from more avant-garde approaches to songwriting.
“That’s something I don’t do, I’m just an everyday storyteller.”
rod stewart
In the meantime, when he was at the top, people like Tom Waits were reinventing what it meant to be a composer. He could write ballads in the same way the Eagles could, but that had already been done, and it was much more exciting for him to start working with strange songwriting techniques like the music on Rain Dogs or the peculiar effects found on Bone Machine.
It might not have been for everyone, but Stewart could see what he was doing in no time when he first heard songs like ‘Downtown Train’, saying, “It’s a great song. Tom’s one of the all-time wonderful lyricists, he really is. Wow, so clever. Paints vivid pictures with his words. That’s something I don’t do, I’m just an everyday storyteller.”
And compared to Stewart’s lyricism, Waits’s approach has become somewhat of a lost art in some respects. Most people can try their hardest to find the best music that they can put behind them, but by getting the perfect accompaniment behind his words, Waits is practically a sonic actor telling the most macabre stories ever written with the slightest dash of sincerity behind it.
It was never going to sell millions of copies the same way that albums like Gasoline Alley or Every Picture Tells a Story did, but that didn’t matter to Stewart. It was about the craftsmanship behind every line, and looking back on Waits’s back catalogue, there’s a treasure trove of tortured music perfect for anyone to stumble upon.
