Atlantic Crossing

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Then there is Holland-Dozier-Holland and Sylvia Moy's "This Old Heart of Mine", which includes first signs of disco – "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" was still three years away.

It was done with the rhythm section I've always wanted to record with, the MGs, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, Duck Dunn, Muscle Shoals rhythm section and I even used Al Green's rhythm section," Stewart added. The classic recording of "Sailing" (originally by Gavin Sutherland) has made the song a world wide classic (and interestingly, for some reason, the song was an enormous hit in my home Finland in 1978 when it was anything but a new single). The new backup musicians, mainly from Muscle Shoals and Memphis, provide the kind of crisp, authoritative, very spare basics that manage to suggest much of the pre-1975 Stewart as well as something completely different. With Atlantic Crossing, Stewart ended his association with Ronnie Wood, Ian McLagan and the stable of musicians who had been his core collaborators on his classic run of albums for Mercury Records, fusing soul and folk.Two years later, Crossing would deliver yet another hit, when "I Don't Want to Talk About It" was released as a two-sided single with "The First Cut Is the Deepest," a cut from his follow-up effort A Night on the Town.

Some user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. While the song’s wonderfully bawdy, ofttimes nearly undecipherable lyrics — does he really say, “While I’m jacking off reading Playboy on a hot afternoon”? It's Not The Spotlight" and "Still Love You" both unconvincingly attempt to reintroduce the mandolin to his sound which so characterised earlier hits.It's easy to listen to them and let Stewart's voice distract you from how everything is more together, less raw.

What doesn't help is that the ballads sound considerably slicker, even though the whole thing is definitely slicker than his earlier records.

Stone Cold" to the cod-funk of "Alright for an Hour" through to the killer ballads "I Don't Want To. Anyway, Pearl Jam are apparently big Rod Stewart fans because Stewart does that thing that Pearl Jam are always accused of doing: he front-loads the faster, rockier songs and back-loads the ballads.