Rod Stewart - The Very Best Of Rod Stewart (1998)

With his Sam Cooke phrasing and rough-as-sandpaper voice, Rod Stewart has been both brilliant ("Maggie May") and shameless ("Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?") during his four-decade career, and if he now seems well past his sell-by date, there's no denying that his distinctive voice is a pop culture wonder. This uneven best-of collection drawn from Stewart's often striking Mercury Records era (1969 to 1972) lacks key tracks like the epic "Every Picture Tells a Story," although it does have Stewart's wise cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe," the wonderfully ragged "Cut Across Shorty," and, of course, "Maggie May." This will do for casual fans, perhaps, but why not just go ahead and get his four Mercury albums in their entirety for even more fun?