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In 2000, When he was 55, Rod Stewart started to map out a new career, this time as a landscape gardener. A routine scan had found a cancerous tumor on his thyroid gland, which required a

surgeon to cut into Stewart’s golden throat. The operation can cause a variety of temporary or even permanent voice disorders, including hoarseness and total voice loss. “They didn’t tell me

that when I went in for the operation,” Stewart says now with a roll of his eyes. “Only when I came out.” After the surgery, one of the world’s most famous singers was unable to sing.

Stewart had always been able to count on two things: his voice and his spiked blond bouffant. Now one of them was in jeopardy. (The other one, thank God, was fine.) So he seriously

considered devoting himself to taking care of plants and trees. Not as rewarding as his first career, but a good way to stay active. In the meantime, he painstakingly began relearning how to

sing. “First I could sing one line of ‘Maggie May.’ Then two lines. It was scary.” It took nine months of rehab, but eventually his voice did return. Not all singing voices age with grace

or power, but Stewart thinks the surgery helped him: “It gave my voice an extra quality of warmth.” That warmth has given Stewart, now 80, a glowing body of work that early on included

stints as the frontman of the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces, and culminated in his glorious solo career, which has generated a dazzling 33 singles in the Billboard Top 40, including

“Tonight’s the Night,” “You’re in My Heart,” “Passion,” “Hot Legs,” “Have I Told You Lately,” “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” “Forever Young,” and the notorious “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

which, as he wrote in his 2012 memoir, turned him into “Mr. Disco Trousers.” Stewart grew up among the generation of Brits who venerated American blues, but he also changed styles to sail

with the wind. In the early ’70s, his songs had mandolins and fiddles and helped define the music now known as Americana. By the late ’70s, even female singers, notably Bonnie Tyler and Kim

Carnes, seemed to be channeling his soft-leather voice. He ventured into hard rock, dance music, and in the early ’80s used synthesizers and drum machines. From 2002 to 2010, he had a career

renaissance with five albums that cover Great American Songbook composers, such as Cole Porter and George Gershwin. He’s sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and has had

million-sellers in six consecutive decades. He recorded his 30th studio album, _Blood Red Roses_—while he was again being treated for cancer, this time of the prostate. Diagnosed in 2016, he

had kept the news from his kids, before being declared cancer-free in 2019. “I didn’t want to worry them,” he says. “And I’m all clear now.” Stewart’s stature in the pantheon of vocalists

is secure. _Rolling Stone_ put him on its list of the 50 greatest singers of all time. The British music bible _MOJO_ placed him 51st on its list and praised his “sweet sandpaper” voice.

“Without a doubt, he has the best voice in rock,” Elton John told _MOJO_. I’d interviewed Stewart before, in a huge Manhattan hotel suite where we drank (and finished) a marvelous bottle of

perfectly chilled white wine in the midafternoon. He was affable, unpretentious, and readily admitted that he hadn’t always made the best use of his talent. “There was a bad period in the

mid-’80s when I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a hit record. I won’t worry that it’s shallow,’ ” he told me back then. “But I can sing anything and make it sound halfway decent.” And there’s never been

a rock star more unabashedly comfortable with the jet-set lifestyle than Stewart, a true bon vivant widely known not just for his music but for lavish spending on cars and clothes, multiple

houses and, in the wayback, for gorgeous companions, sometimes in overlapping relationships. He has a gift for making stardom look effortless and has always been refreshingly unapologetic

about his success. “I come from nothing,” he said once. “Then all of a sudden, I’m faced with a lot of glamorous women. What am I going to do?” Now Sir Rod (he was knighted in 2016) appears

to be busier than ever, with his Las Vegas residency, more than 40 additional live shows scheduled this year (including two co-headline dates with Billy Joel) and, as he revealed to me in a

breezy interview in April, several new albums in the works. Maarten de Boer While the singer of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and “Hot Legs” is indeed a grandpa, it’s also clear he hasn’t entirely

matured. To stay in shape and feed his competitive appetite, he recently began running 100-meter sprints on his private track. “I got it down to 19 seconds by learning how to push off,” he

enthuses. “I’m going to try and do 17 seconds, which I think is a world record for an 80-year-old.” It doesn’t take long to realize that his life consists mostly of fun, with very little

worry, which is why his wife, Penny Lancaster, 54, has called him “my eldest child.” His son Alastair, a towering 19-year-old model, one of two kids he has with Lancaster, passes through the

room while we are chatting and asks why his dad hadn’t replied to a recent phone call. “I did hear you screaming,” the elder Stewart retorts with a grin. Today, and not unusually, he wears

the green-and-white jersey of Glasgow’s Celtic FC, the Scottish soccer team he adores. He pauses the interview to show off his opulent 10-bedroom home—filled with pre-Raphaelite paintings—on

46 acres in Essex, England. “It’s like Buckingham Palace, isn’t it?” he asks. Charm pours from him, as does self-deprecation, candor, a sense of not taking himself too seriously, and a few

lively turns of phrase as he discusses work, family, friends—and frolic. YOUR FAMILY SEEMS LIKE THE ARCHETYPE OF ONE THAT DIDN’T HAVE MUCH MONEY BUT WAS CLOSE AND LOVING. We were a

working-class family—all work and no class. [_Grins_] I was the youngest by 10 years, and I was given lots of attention, plus the odd chocolate now and then. Didn’t have much money, but it

didn’t seem like a worry at the time. YOU WERE 26 WHEN “MAGGIE MAY” CAME OUT AND YOU’D HAD SEVERAL MISFIRES BEFORE THAT, IN TERMS OF CHART SUCCESS. WHAT GAVE YOU THE CONFIDENCE TO KEEP AT

IT? Family, without a doubt. A lot of my mates who were trying to get into the music business had dads who’d say “Get a real job.” Nobody in my family said that.  I was 19 when I turned

professional. You get this burning ambition in your chest: _I want to sing_. It was either singing or soccer, and I didn’t do soccer as well as I could’ve done, because I was already falling

in love with music. I was a beatnik, busking on the beaches of Brighton and singing under the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I got my breakthrough with Long John Baldry, who helped bring American

blues to the British Isles. He found me in a railway station, playing harmonica after I’d been to his concert and was on my way home. He said I looked like “a bundle of rags with a huge nose

sticking out.” He asked me to play harmonica in his band, and I said, “I can sing a bit as well.” INDEED YOU CAN. DID YOUR FAMILY’S SUPPORT MAKE YOUR SUCCESS SWEETER? The first time I heard

“Maggie May” on the radio, I was driving in London. I turned around and went all the way back to me mum and dad’s house to tell them. Of course, they started crying. That was a magical

moment. When I got a check for $1 million from Mercury Records, I showed it to them. And I took them everywhere with me. I took my dad on the Concorde. And he was a Scotsman, right? So as we

were coming in to land, he asked the stewardess for the bill. Bless him, my dad.