The Very Best of Rod Stewart [Warner Bros.]

1	Rhythm of My Heart 4:14
2	Maggie May 5:46
3	Have I Told You Lately That I Love You 4:04
4	This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You) / Ronald Isley 4:11
5	Young Turks 5:04
6	Downtown Train 4:40
7	You Wear It Well 5:00
8	Reason to Believe / Ronnie Wood 3:52
9	Some Guys Have All the Luck 4:34
10	Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) 3:56
11	Hot Legs 5:15
12	Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? 5:30
13	My Heart Can't Tell You No 5:16
14	You're in My Heart (The Final Acclaim) 4:30
15	Ooh la La 4:16
16	Forever Young 4:05

Barnes & Noble

The 15-page booklet that accompanies this album does not include any liner notes; instead, it is jam-packed with photographs of Rod Stewart, from his rosy-cheeked Faces period to his current mature but still frostily coiffed look. A little indulgent, sure, but what do you expect from the man who titled his folk-rock masterpiece Every Picture Tells a Story? The picture collage does more than appease fans who answer affirmatively to Rod's disco query "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" With childhood photos, stage pictures, and snapshots of Rod in drag, it underscores Stewart's remarkably easy manner. That same bemused, self-assured quality is all over his music, which wisely puts his signature rasp front-and-center. This disc focuses mostly on the enduring, soulful tunes of his hit record-churning solo career. The Very Best of Rod Stewart features radio classics like "Maggie May," "Young Turks," and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" and a slew of other hits from his truly impressive repertoire. The compilation also showcases several covers that suggest that Stewart is one of pop's finer interpreters -- from the gorgeous Tom Waits-penned "Downtown Train" to his Unplugged renditions of Tim Hardin's classic "Reason to Believe" and Van Morrison's sentimental "Have I Told You Lately." Yes, diehard fans will miss Stewart's most ambitious song, the moving "The Killing of Georgie Pt. 1-2." But fans of every era of Stewart's solo career will love this near-complete survey of his most popular hits. Ganda Suthivarakom

All Music Guide

Rhino's 2001 collection The Very Best of Rod Stewart aims to be comprehensive. Rhino has open access to the Warner vaults, and Stewart had many, many hits for the label -- nearly two decades' worth, in fact. During those two decades, he was pursuing the shifting tides of pop fashion, delving into disco, new wave, adult contemporary ballads, and retro-rock with equal abandon. Rhino also pulled "Maggie" and "You Wear It Well" from Mercury and randomly placed them in this arbitrarily sequenced 16-track collection, which is pitched closely to Stewart's late-'80s/early-'90s adult contemporary hits (which perhaps makes sense, since those recordings had yet to appear on a single-disc collection) and has a great majority of his Top Ten hits. Stephen Thomas Erlewine