Never A Dull Moment

Certain Songs #2006: Rod Stewart – “You Wear It Well”

January 16, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never A Dull Moment
Year: 1972

. . .

Rod Stewart never really had what the pop chart folks call an “imperial phase,” where everything he released as a single automatically made the top 10. That said, he never really went away, either, lobbing occasional singles to the top of the charts until 1993, which is a pretty good run.

But that also means that songs you might remember as massive singles in the wake of “Maggie May” didn’t do as well as you might have expected: the Faces raucous “Stay With Me” and today’s “You Wear It Well maxed out at 17 and 13, respectively, the former overachieving and the latter underachieving.

Certain Songs #2005: Rod Stewart – “Italian Girls”

January 15, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never A Dull Moment
Year: 1972

. . .

You’d think after four albums, Rod Stewart & Ronnie Wood would have run out of songs like this, but the rascally, raggedy “Italian Girls” comes across like something from Exile on Main St, like the song that would have connected “Tumbling Dice” to “Sweet Virginia.”

I was going to joke that the first half of “Italian Girls” played like Ronnie Wood’s audition tape for the Stones, but of course, that was pretty much his entire career in the 1970s, and anyways, we’ll get to all of that in about a month or so, won’t we?

Certain Songs #2004: Rod Stewart – “Lost Paraguayos”

January 14, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never A Dull Moment
Year: 1972

. . .

The massive success of “Maggie May” and Every Picture Tells a Story turned Rod Stewart into ROD STEWART, SUPERSTAR, the kind of guy who would later humblebrag in his autobiography “at one point I was cheating on a Playboy model with another Playboy model” and make it seem charming.

But if it went to his head — which, eventually, it did, of course — you couldn’t tell it from the follow-up, 1972’s Never A Dull Moment, his fourth straight utter winner, full of songs that were seemingly tossed off, like the early highlight, “Lost Paraguayos.”