Every Picture Tells A Story

About Every Picture Tells A Story

"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. It was released as a single in Spain, backed with "Reason to Believe." 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. 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." Music critic Greil Marcus regards the song as "Rod Stewart's greatest performance."The lyrics of "Every Picture Tells a Story" from 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. Locations of his adventures include Paris, Rome and Peking. Allmusic critic Denise Sullivan commented that lyrics are racist and sexist (e.g., describing an Asian woman as a "slit-eyed lady"), 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."However, a live version of the song performed by Stewart in 1992, 21 years after the original album version was released, skips a complete verse containing some particularly unkind and crude references to women, as well as a self-deprecating reference: "I firmly believed that I/Didn't need anyone but me/I sincerely felt I was so complete/Look how wrong you can be/The women I've known I wouldn't let tie my shoe/They wouldn't give you the time of day/But the slit-eyed lady knocked me off my feet/God I was so glad I found her". Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the song as "devilishly witty." The lyrics begin with a reference to the theme of self-discovery: more »