Rod Stewart, It Had to Be You...the Great American Songbook, (J-Records)

So the truth emerges. Inside every rocker, there's a jazz singer struggling to emerge. In It Had to Be You, Rod Stewart completes his metamorphosis from Rod the Mod to Stewart the Crooner. It's been quite a journey: from member of The Faces to Every Picture Tells a Story (inarguably one of the great albums of the rock era) to purveyor of disco, widely ridiculed by the Punks, for whom he represented the great sellout. Now he emerges again, as interpreter of 14 of the Tin Pan Alley standards that we are told he has loved since his youth. The album has taken a few hard knocks. "He doesn't matter anymore," wrote Rolling Stone, desperate to assure us that it still does. Okay, so he's no Ella or Louis or Dinah Washington or Helen Merrill. But Stewart's strength has always been that unmistakable voice and he uses it to fairly good effect here. There's no sense of mocking, or slumming or putting on the ritz; he genuinely seems to love this music, for which he adopts a silkier than usual tone (perhaps that's just a sign of aging) rather than his usual rasp. The arrangements by producer Phil Ramone are Nelson Riddle-like and the songs are unbeatable: They Can't Take That Away from Me, I'll Be Seeing You, For All We Know, These Foolish Things, Moonglow, and quite a lovely version of The Way You Look Tonight. It's all very ballady, all very wine for two by the firelight-y. But it's effective and, if you can shuck your preconceptions and rid yourself of the image of Do You Think I'm Sexy?, it's charming too, although I'd prefer to see him mix up the tempo a bit more if he records an encore.

Photo Credit: rodstewart.com