Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 10/10/2006
Early on in his career
Rod Stewart established himself as one of
rock's great interpretive vocalists, which made the flatness of his
Great American Songbook series a bit puzzling. If any classic
rock veteran of the '60s
should have been able to offer new spins on old
standards, it should have been Rod the Mod, who was turning
Elvis'
"All Shook Up" inside out on
Jeff Beck's
Truth and turned
the Rolling Stones' defiant
"Street Fighting Man" into a
folk-rock lament, all before
"Maggie May" turned
Rod into a star. But none of the
Great American Songbook volumes strayed from the tried and true, which may have been part of the reason they were big hits -- after all, familiar songs are always warmly received when they're performed in a familiar fashion -- but they were filled with undistinguished performances that bordered on laziness. It was possible to make excuses for his performances, chief among them that
Stewart was simply not rooted in this material, so he simply chose the easiest route out of the song, but it didn't change the fact that all three records were deadly dull, even if they were enormous successes one and all. It's hard to give up that success, particularly for a veteran who was so desperate for a hit a few years back, he foolishly attempted the clunky modern
R&B album
Human, so it's not surprising that when he moved on from the Great American Songbook, he chose a related project:
Great Rock Classics of Our Time, which is the subtitle of 2006's
Still the Same, his first new record since
GAS, and one that shares the aesthetic of that respectful and commercial trawl through the past.
Still the Same finds
Rod singing 13 songs that more or less could be called
rock standards, every one of them hits since
Stewart himself was a hitmaker, most of them dating from the '70s, when he was a superstar (roughly ten, if you count
"Love Hurts" as a hit for
Nazareth, which in this context you should).
Not a bad idea at all, at least on paper, since this would seem to return
Rod to his strengths: singing
rock & roll and
pop, influenced by
soul and a little bit of
country and
folk. This theory has a bit of a problem, however. It's made under the assumption that it would be the
Rod of the '70s singing songs from the '70s instead of the
Rod of the new millennium singing songs of the '70s -- and the latter, of course, is what is featured on
Still the Same. That means instead of Rod the Interpreter you get Rod the Karaoke Star, singing over arrangements that aren't merely familiar, but nearly exact replicas of the original hits. This isn't far removed from
The Great American Songbook, which never offered a surprise, but those at least had the excellent work of
Richard Perry, who was faithful without being slavish. Here, almost without exception, the arrangements deliberately recall the original hits, right down to grace notes and throwaway fills. This doesn't necessarily make for a lousy record, since
Rod does indeed sound more comfortable fronting a
rock band than he did singing with a big band, but
Stewart makes no attempt to stamp these tunes with his own personality. Nowhere is that truer than on
"It's a Heartache." Bonnie Tyler's delivery on the original was a downright homage to
Rod, so close to his raspy phrasing that it was (and is) often mistaken for
Rod himself. So what does he do on his version? He copies it, right down to the inflections. It's not bad; it's just pointless, because
Tyler's original sounds more like classic
Rod than
Rod's does here. And while that sentiment may hold true for only
"It's a Heartache," the rest of the album follows suit. The title
Still the Same is all too true: these are the same versions of the same old songs you know and love, only they're now sleepily sung by
Stewart. It's not the worst album he's done, and it's an improvement over
The Great American Songbook if only because it plays to his strengths, but it aspires to be nothing more than pleasant and it achieves nothing so much as being just that.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
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