Rod Stewart - Soulbook
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CD Details
Artist: Rod StewartBrand: Baker & Taylor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2009-10-26
Model: 886973025628
Music Label: J-Records
Product features:
- STEWART ROD SOULBOOK
- It's The Same Old Song
- My Cherie Amour Featuring Stevie Wonder
- You Make Me Feel Brand New Duet with Mary J. Blige
- (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher
- Tracks Of My Tears Featuring Smokey Robinson
- Let It Be Me Duet with Jennifer Hudson
- Rainy Night In Georgia
- What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted
- Love Train
- You've Really Got A Hold On Me
- Wonderful World
- If You Don't Know Me By Now
- Just My Imagination
Music reviews of Soulbook
Music Review: Odd Arrangement of Some Songs Does Not Deny Stewart Success
Rating: 4 Stars
I know this is far from a unanimous opinion, but I believe Rod Stewart is perhaps the most versatile recording artist of the past half-century. His hard-rocking hits, his hauntingly poignant ballads, his fun little bouncy numbers like "Lost in You," his Great American Songbook that made the old pop standards cool again, and now this. All of them are consistent, all have a certain distinctive Rod Stewart style that unites these otherwise disparate songs that could never be captured in anyone else's cover. Whenever I hear he's branching out into a new style, my thoughts are "Yeah, he can do that." I even enjoy "Human" and "Still the Same"--they feel like genuine Rod Stewart albums to me.
I was delighted to hear that the original Blue-Eyed Soul Boy was doing an all-soul album. Soul is nothing new for him, of course; on Out of Order, he gives a good if slightly muted rendition of "Try a Little Tenderness" in the style of Otis Redding; though that song is not a Redding original, he certainly has made the signature cover. And on the remarkable album "A Spanner in the Works," Rod sings a touching tribute to Muddy, Sam, and Otis.
So my excitement that he was finally putting out a new CD at all was only heightened by the list of soul songs he takes a crack at here. As soon as you put in the CD, you'll be rewarded with a slow, haunting first verse of "It's the Same Old Song." Often I put the CD in just to hear the first minute. The rest of the song is at a much faster pace with more backup that should have your feet tapping and dispel the melancholy of that slow, sad first verse.
This leads in well to the next three songs, "My Cherie Amour," "You Make Me Feel Brand New," and "Higher and Higher." The former and latter are bouncy and energetic; the middle is a bit of a fluff piece, not contributing a whole lot to the album but still sustaining the flow between Tracks 2 and 4. I think of it the way I think of Odegai Khan, son of Genghis and father of Kublai.
The album is predominantly somber, however, and the tone of that haunting first verse of "It's the Same Old Song" will be recaptured by "Tracks of My Tears," "Let It Be Me," "Rainy Night in Georgia"--that last is particularly evocative of Every Beat of My Heart's "Ten Days of Rain" and The Definitive Rod Stewart's "Two Shades of Blue," but in a slow, soul kind of way.
That raps up the soulful crooning of the album, and from there it's on to "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted," arranged for a bigger sound and a more light-hearted pace. It feels like someone is discussing the pathos of the first half of the album from a detached perspective.
Next up is "Love Train," which I skip as often as not. That and the song two tracks later, "Wonderful World," ("Don't know much about history/Don't know much bi-ol-ogy!") are silly, annoying songs, and I doubt there can ever be any saving of them. But Rod does his best with them, singing his heart out on "Love Train" as only he can and striking a bopping kind of tone for "Wonderful World" which is at least technically appropriate. I guess they come off as mostly harmless. But even at their best they're bouncy, meaningless earwash, which seems out of place with the intensity of the songs which came before. Taken together with the also light but more bearable "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" which they sandwich, this interlude manages to break up the flow of the rest of the album, especially since it next leads into the aching, raw, pain-filled "If You Don't Know Me By Now."
This "If You Don't Know Me By Now" makes even the first half of the album seem cheerful, and differs from those artfully crooned ballads in its unadorned intensity of emotion. While this song is fine technically, the art and science of music take a distant back seat here as Stewart pours out his most earnest performance since perhaps "I Don't Wanna Talk About It." Whenever I hear the song I can't help thinking of the people in my life who have destroyed relationships with distrust and misunderstanding. It's a chilling sound indeed.
From there it's onto "Just My Imagination," which is almost as out of step as a follower as "Wonderful World" was as a lead-in. However, we could certainly use a break after that song is finished, and "Just My Imagination" is a pleasant, whimsical finale for the CD. You might say Rod sounds a little flat on it, but I think the generic, only lightly emotional voice is appropriate if you want to ease out on a gentle note after the roller coaster of the preceding fifty minutes.
Of course, if Soulbook is the only CD I have in my changer, I usually don't let it end there. "Just My Imagination" makes for an odd lead-in, for which I can't fault the arrangers because they never meant it to be a lead-in at all; but before popping the CD out I usually can't resist letting it skip back to the first track and ending the CD on the note that began it, the hauntingly crooned "A sentimental foo-oool am I; To hear and old love song and wanna cry. . . . "
Description of Soulbook
2009 album from the Grammy Award winning Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer. SoulBook is a collection of classic '60s and '70s era Soul favorites sung by one of the most interpretive voices in music. Stewart is personally passionate about this project, which is a return to his beginnings when he fronted The Jeff Beck Band and the critically-revered band The Faces, iconic in the history books for fusing American roots music - Rock, Soul and Blues. Soulbook reunites Stewart with his longtime collaborators, producers Steve Tyrell and Steve Jordan, of Rolling Stones/Xpensive Winos fame, who also brought in top musicians Ray Parker Jr., Waddy Watchel, Darrell Jones, Dean Parks and David Paich to join Rod in the studio for the album.Pop CDs
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