Rod Stewart - Vagabond Heart - Alternate Version (1991)

Rod Stewart has had a checkered  musical history. He's sold over 250 millions albums worldwide, making him one of the most commercially successful musicians in history. As recently as 2012, he had an album that went double platinum in the US. 

But despite all that success, most serious rock fans think that he lost his musical mojo a long time ago. The common perception is that he did great with the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces, and his solo albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but as the 1970s went on, he sold out, becoming the poster boy for the excessive rock star lifestyle, with drugs, sex, and material goods overwhelming his love of the music. The disco hit "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" is scoffed at to show how drastically he'd changed. Since then, his reputation has only gotten worse, with a series of "Great American Songbook" albums in the 2000s that sold like hotcakes but were critically derided.

I generally agree with all that. Stewart's career since about 1976 has been a disappointment, even though he's put out many worthy hit songs. But I would add an important caveat. I think he had a mini-career revival in the early 1990s. This can best be seen by the critically successful "Unplugged" album he released in 1993. I've already posted a complete version of that here. But he also put out a couple of decent albums around that time. What I'd like to do here is present an alternate version of one of them that removes the weakest songs and replaces them with some better stray tracks. Had he actually released this version of the album, I think the reputation of his early 1990s material would be much improved.

In my opinion, a key problem with his music from the mid-1970s onwards was that he was a follower of musical trends that haven't aged well. First, he latched onto disco. Then, went new wave became the big thing in the early 1980s, he latched onto that, slathering his recordings with synthesizers and big drums and all the other 1980s overproduction techniques that are often derided today. Thankfully, in the early 1990s, that sound fell out of favor. It seems around that time Stewart returned to more of the classic rock sound that made him a superstar in the first place. Mind you, there still were poppy and cheesy elements that serious rockers wouldn't approve of, but it wasn't as heavy as with his 1980s recordings. I think he especially looked to the Motown sound of the 1960s for inspiration, which was a sound that was both soulful yet poppy and very popular. He even had a hit with a song called "The Motown Song!"

One other problem albums had in this time period, in my opinion, is something I call "CD bloat." In the late 1980s, the maximum length of a single album went from around 50 minutes to about 77 minutes, thanks to the widespread popularity of the new CD medium. Many artists that had had to edit themselves to get their albums down to 50 minutes of less went wild and put out albums cover to 77 minutes. "Vagabond Heart" is an example of this, clocking in at 58 minutes.

So what I've done is cut the 14 songs down to eight. Then I added three more back in, for a total of 11. This cuts the length of the album from 58 minutes to 44 minutes, and in this case, I think less is more. (Note that I consider the song "Downtown Train," a 1989 hit, as one of the original 14. Technically, it's a bonus track, but it's been available on most versions of the album.) 

The three added songs are: "Highgate Shuffle," "Sweet Soul Music," and "Somebody to Hold." The first two are live covers from 1991 that were released on an archival live album. The last one is a less common bonus track.

If you're only a casual Rod Stewart who gave up on his albums prior to the start of the 1990s, you should give this a try. No, it's not the second coming of his 1971 classic "Every Picture Tells a Story." Yes, it's still somewhat dated to its time. But it's a pretty darn good album in my opinion, much better than the bloated official version.

01 Rhythm of My Heart (Rod Stewart)
02 Rebel Heart (Rod Stewart)
03 Broken Arrow (Rod Stewart)
04 Highgate Shuffle (Rod Stewart)
05 It Takes Two (Rod Stewart & Tina Turner)
06 The Motown Song (Rod Stewart with the Temptations)
07 Sweet Soul Music (Rod Stewart)
08 Go Out Dancing (Rod Stewart)
09 Downtown Train (Rod Stewart)
10 Somebody to Hold (Rod Stewart)
11 Have I Told You Lately (Rod Stewart)

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The album cover pictured above is very different from the official version. This comes from a DVD of his 1991 tour, also called "Vagabond Heart." So all I had to do was remove the word "Tour" from the bottom of the flying red heart.