Rod Stewart may have began his career as a respected singer, yet that respect eroded as he got older, as he became more concerned with stardom than music. While he has recorded some terrible albums -- and he would admit that freely -- Rod Stewart was once rock & roll's best interpretive singer, as well as an accomplished songwriter, creating a raw combination of folk, rock, blues, and country that sounded like no other folk-rock or country-rock. Instead of finding the folk in rock, he found how folk rocked like hell on its own. After Rod Stewart became successful, he began to lose the rootsier elements of his music, yet he remained a superb singer, even as he abandoned his own artistic path in favor of following pop trends.

Rod Stewart began his musical career after spending some time as an apprentice with the Brentford Football Club, touring Europe with folk singer Wizz Jones in the early '60s; during this time he was deported from Spain for vagrancy. When he returned to England in 1963, he joined the Birmingham-based R&B group Jimmy Powell & the Five Dimensions, as a vocalist and harmonica player. The band toured the U.K. and recorded one single for Pye Records, which featured Stewart on blues harp. After moving back to London, Rod Stewart joined Long John Baldry's band, the Hoochie Coochie Men. The group recorded a single in 1964, "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," which failed to chart and soon afterward the group evolved into Steampacket.

Rod Stewart reunited with Ron Wood to record an MTV Unplugged concert in 1993; the accompanying album launched the Top Ten hit single, "Have I Told You Lately." Unplugged also returned Rod Stewart to a more acoustic-based sound. On his 1995 album, A Spanner in the Works, the singer explored a more polished version of this sound, scoring another hit with Tom Petty's "Leave Virginia Alone." The following year, he released If We Fall in Love Tonight, which was comprised of both previously released and new material. When We Were the New Boys followed in 1998. Human followed in early 2001.