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“I’ve always appreciated great singers,” Rod Stewart said in 2019. “Whether it be Billie Holiday – they don’t have to be rock singers.”
Growing up, Stewart’s parents were big fans of Frank Sinatra, so he often listened to Sinatra’s songs and studied the way he sang, learning his technique and trying to do the exact same thing. Of course, the blonde-haired rocker has a completely different sort of tone to Sinatra’s velvety smooth belting, but Sinatra encouraged him to treat his voice like an independent tool for emotional expression in ways he hadn’t before.
Early on in his career, Stewart was able to imitate all these elements of his favourite singers with little warm-up, taking to the stage ready to switch between his signature raspy belting and the more delicate, warm crooning. This worked for a long while because he didn’t really have to think too much about sustaining himself, so long as the music sounded good and people still showed up.
Over time, however, he learned that much of singing and singing technique was about approaching it like an athlete, taking care of his vocal cords so that he didn’t destroy his voice. Of course, it helps a whole lot that Stewart has never smoked a single cigarette, despite his voice sounding like it’s been worn down by countless packs during the more rock ‘n’ roll periods in his life. But avoiding all sorts of damage has allowed him to maintain his familiar tone while still being able to belt where it counts.
And where it counts – in Stewart’s eyes – is in rock music. While he occasionally diverged from this fated path and dabbled in softer sounds and the Great American Songbook, he has always been his most powerful singing rock, whether as the primary force in Faces or in the more eclectic infusions of his explorations throughout the 1980s.
But where this becomes especially interesting is that Stewart’s favourite singers, as he said before, aren’t always from the same space. Yes, he idolised people like Buddy Holly, mainly because that kind of energy was enough to make him fall in love with music over and over again and maintain his own standard of passion and enthusiasm whenever he went on stage.
However, he also absorbed the talents of people like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke at a time when he wasn’t “sure” about his voice, admiring the absolute giants of vocal talent to try to make himself sound even better. Sinatra was already in the pile, of course, as he had been since Stewart was around nine years old. But Redding and Cooke were the blueprints, people he knew would push him to stand apart if he studied them and could emulate them well enough.
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Redding, in particular, also had that inexplicable emotional pull that Stewart struggled to put into words, the type that always moved him to tears when he saw him live in concert, mesmerised by his talent whenever he sang one of his all-time favourites, ‘Try a Little Tenderness‘.
Later reflecting on the impact of those two pillars of vocal excellence, Stewart said, “I wanted to always sound like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, so that’s the way I went – I suppose I was trying to be different from anybody else.”
Even though he cut his chops on the rock space, it’s easy to detect the styles of both of Stewart’s heroes in his own style. After all, Stewart is no doubt one of the most versatile singers out there, and it’s all down to the way he learned early on how to exercise different types of emotions through Cooke’s smooth melody and Redding’s raw, gritty range.
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