An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down by Rod Stewart

An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down is Rod Stewart's first solo album, cut the same year he threw in his lot with the Faces and first issued in America in November 1969 as The Rod Stewart Album; Britain got it under the longer, stranger title a few months later. Stewart, fresh from singing with the Jeff Beck Group, brought friends along: Faces mates Ronnie Wood and Ian McLagan, Keith Emerson, Beck Group drummer Micky Waller, and Steamhammer guitarists Martin Pugh and Martin Quittenton.

The result is a scruffy, soulful thing, rock and roll shot through with folk and R&B, with that sandpaper rasp of a voice sitting right up front. "Handbags and Gladrags" shows where he was headed: a singer who could make a ballad sound lived-in. America barely noticed at first, the record stalling at 139 on the Billboard chart, but the blueprint for everything that came next is all here.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.