Rod Stewart’s career is a large book with several chapters, from his blues-singing days with Jeff Beck (“I Ain’t Superstitious”), to his rock/pop work with the Faces (“Stay With Me”), to his solo albums that included a nod to disco music (“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”), as well as several albums of his take on the Great American Songbook and other standards. Somehow, he has managed to be extremely successful with all of these. But because of his stylistic changes and his perennial sex appeal, the side of Stewart that has gone largely ignored is his songwriting ability. While many of his original tracks have been co-writes, he wrote frequently by himself in the early years. “Mandolin Wind,” from his 1971 Every Picture Tells a Story album, is a tune he wrote single-handedly that is still cherished as one of that era’s most sensitive and compelling love ballads.
“Mandolin Wind” is notable for being a song that is based solely on imagination, or is maybe inspired by cinema or literature, as opposed to any type of personal experience; the song’s backdrop is a harsh winter on the American prairie, something Stewart wouldn’t have had much firsthand knowledge of. And it’s an unusual piece for having been written by someone whose background to that point had been early rock ‘n’ roll and Chicago blues. In his mid-20s at the time, Stewart had only taken songwriting seriously for a few years, but somehow tapped into that inspirational place we all want to visit as writers, coming up with an exceptional four-verse story about love and loyalty. There’s no actual chorus or bridge, and the narrator’s love for his lady is reaffirmed when the first three verses, as well as the song itself, simply end with the words, “I love ya.”
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Stewart has talked about “Mandolin Wind” over the years but hasn’t spoken much about exactly what inspired it. In the book by Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred, Rod Stewart: The New Biography, the authors, and Stewart, talk about the song. “This is a stunning ballad about a frontier settler declaring his love for the woman who has stayed with him,” the authors write, “while the buffalo died around them, during a freezing winter … he made every pop producer sit up and applaud his audacity for projecting the sound of the mandolin in such dominant fashion. ‘I always thought the mandolin was such a romantic-sounding instrument, [Stewart] says. ‘I found the mandolin guy … in a restaurant in London … playing stock romantic songs from the 1930s. In the studio I’d just whistle the parts.’”
Like many older artists, Stewart appears onstage in Las Vegas these days, performing in an entertainment atmosphere that doesn’t much lend itself to including this mostly-acoustic song in the set list. But it’s still a favorite of his fan base, and helped launch his career on an album that made him a major star. He was not only the writer, but also the producer of the five-minute-plus song. Critically regarded as one of the finest pieces he ever wrote or recorded, “Mandolin Wind” has been covered by such respected artists as the Everly Brothers, Earl Scruggs, and most recently last year by Amy Helm.