“To learn their trade”: The one artist Rod Stewart said every singer should study
There isn’t really a rulebook that comes with being a great rock and roll singer. Every single person that’s ever stepped onstage wanting to blow people away always approaches in their unique way, and whether that’s through nervous energy or pure swagger, it’s hard to find anything wrong with them as long as they have the crowd singing along with them. And while Rod Stewart did have his reservations about becoming a vocalist at first, he knew that some artists did a better job at setting an example for future generations of rock stars.
Looking at how Stewart approached his craft, much of it has to do with the pure rasp he got out of his voice. Not many people can fake that kind of grit that was in his throat whenever he sang tunes like ‘Stay With Me’, but by the time he left The Faces, he realised that he could do a lot more with his voice than boozy rock and roll.
Someone like Jeff Beck doesn’t ask someone to join his band by accident, and when Stewart started embracing his inner bluesman on Truth, he seemed to be on the right track until Led Zeppelin showed up to steal their whole schtick. He may have had to hide behind the amps on the band’s inaugural tours of America, but Stewart hardly had anything to worry about on his versions of ‘You Shook Me’. For all his great moments with Beck, though, no one expected him to be so good at ballads.
Every rock and roller knew how to take it down a notch, but starting with ‘Maggie May’, Stewart always had a unique approach to making his slower tunes. He did have a mellow acoustic side, but looking at everything he released following 1979, his greatest songs revolved around him slowing things down a touch and embracing his role at the front of the stage the same way a seasoned entertainer would.
And considering his biggest influences were the biggest names in soul, it’s not exactly shocking why he would put a little more R&B into his delivery. He was already in love with the sounds of Motown and artists like The Temptations since the days before he started singing, but if anyone ever wanted to be a singer that made the listener feel something, it all traces back to what Billie Holiday was doing.
“Any young singer out there who wants to learn their trade, listen to [how] Billie Holiday phrases her words.”
Rod Stewart
Compared to every other bluesy singer of rock god before him, Stewart knew that no one would ever come close to what Holiday did during her lifetime, saying, “Her quirkiness was the way she phrased. Any young singer out there who wants to learn their trade, listen to [how] Billie Holiday phrases her words. The voice is an instrument.” But for someone with Holiday’s strength, the instrument analogy would be underselling it a little bit.
Listening through to a song like ‘Strange Fruit’, there are some sounds that come from her voice that go beyond any kind of instrumental run. Many people could appreciate the craft on display if they wanted to, but the main reason it sounded so great is that you could feel the genuine heartache in her voice whenever she got close to the mic.
And while Stewart’s tearjerkers like ‘Forever Young’ and ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ do come close to capturing that kind of spirit, it’s all done in service to what Holiday had done before. A lot of the greatest artists of all time start off with the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ mentality, but there’s genuinely no way of even attempting to emulate the raw hurt Holiday put into her material.
