| "Every Picture Tells a Story" | ||||||||||
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| Song by Rod Stewart from the album Every Picture Tells a Story | ||||||||||
| Released | 1971 | |||||||||
| Genre | Rock, hard rock[1] | |||||||||
| Length | 5:59 | |||||||||
| Label | Mercury | |||||||||
| Writer | Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood | |||||||||
| Producer | Rod Stewart | |||||||||
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"Every Picture Tells a Story" is a song written by Rod Stewart and Ron Wood and initially released as the title track of Stewart's 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. It has since been released on numerous Stewart compilation and live albums, including The Best of Rod Stewart, Storyteller – The Complete Anthology: 1964–1990 and Unplugged...and Seated.[2] It has also been covered by The Georgia Satellites on their 1986 album Georgia Satellites and by Robin McAuley on Forever Mod: A Tribute to Rod Stewart.[3][4] In the Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Paul Evans described "Every Picture Tells a Story" and "Maggie May," another song off the Every Picture Tells a Story album, as Rod Stewart's and Ron Wood's "finest hour—happy lads wearing their hearts on their sleeves."[5] Music critic Greil Marcus regards the song as "Rod Stewart's greatest performance."[6]
The lyrics of "Every Picture Tells a Story" tell a first person narrative of the singer finding adventures with women all over the world but eventually returning home after having learned some moral lessons.[2][7] Locations of his adventures include Paris, Rome and Peking. Allmusic critic Denise Sullivan commented that lyrics are racist and sexist, and that the song "is a real nugget from a brief period in time when rock singers didn't worry about what it meant to be rude -- in fact, the ruder and cruder, the better."[2] Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the song as "devilishly witty."[8] The lyrics begin with a reference to the theme of self-discovery:[9]
The song's music incorporates many elements. Toby Creswell describes the opening guitar theme as reflective and melancholy.[9] As the guitar opening fades, the drums played by Micky Waller crash primitively before Stewart begins to sing.[8][9] In his review of the album in Rolling Stone Magazine, John Mendelsohn noted that this song "does rock with ferocity via a simple but effective seven-note ascension/five-note descension riff that Waller cleverly punctuates with a halved-time bass-drum-against-snare lick."[7] The rhythm is loose throughout most of the song, although it tightens in the coda.[6] Stewart biographers Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred describe the music as "as mess - unbalanced and shoddily thrown together," although the "vocals pull the song out of trouble."[10] Despite being a hard rock song, the song primarily uses acoustic instruments, although guitarist Ron Wood does use an electric guitar occasionally.[2] Greil Marcus also praises the acoustic guitar parts that are played after each verse and the drum roll after the first verse.[6] According to Stewart, he found the mandolin and violin players for this song and for "Maggie May" in a restaurant in London.[10] Maggie Bell and Long John Baldry provide energetic harmony vocals, including the line "She claimed that it just ain't natural" in response to Stewart's line "Shanghai Lil never used the pill."[2][6][10] Allmusic's Sullivan describes the song as "just plain visceral -- so much so that [it is] better heard than described" and that it represents six minutes of "defining rock & roll."[2]
"Every Picture Tells a Story" was used in the Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous in a scene where the band listens to the song as they ride away in a bus.[2][11] It was also included on the soundtrack of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. The song was also referenced in Jayne Anne Phillips' short story "What It Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive."[6] While the story's character Sue is lying in bed in the dark "Rod Stewart, scratchy and loud, combed his hair in a thousand different ways and came out looking just the same."[6] Greil Marcus uses the reference to the song in "What It Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive" to muse on what makes a good record and why "Every Picture Tells a Story" is a good record, i.e., a good record is one that "entering a person's life, can enable that person to live more intensely—as, whatever else it does, 'Every Picture Tells a Story' does for Jayne Anne Phillips' Sue."[6]