Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? - 2008 Remaster

Rod Stewart was known for his soulful blues and folk ballads, but this song was a disco departure, and it gave him a new look. He attracted many new fans, but alienated many of his old ones, who had no interest in disco and fondly remembered Rod as a member of the Faces, where he earned a reputation as hard-rocking party animal. "If I ever wrote a song which put a fly in the ointment or a spanner in the works - it's this one," he explained in his 1989 Storyteller collection. "It was frightening, stirring up so much love and hate at the same time: most of the public loved it; all of the critics hated it. I can understand both positions." As years passed, the song (and disco in general) became more loved than hated. Speaking in Esquire in 2012, Stewart said: "I used to be embarrassed to sing 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy,' but people love it. So it's in the show."

Most of the music for this song was written by drummer Carmine Appice, who had recently joined Stewart's band. Appice told Songfacts: "We were in the studio and 'Miss You' by The Rolling Stones was a big hit. Rod was always a guy that used to listen to what was going on around him. He was always looking at the charts and listening. He was a big fan of The Rolling Stones, so when they came out with "Miss You," disco was really big at the time, so he wanted to do some kind of disco-y song, something like 'Miss You,' nothing like Gloria Gaynor. With the band, he would always tell us, 'I want a song like this' or 'I want a song like that,' so I went home and I came up with a bunch or chords and a melody. I presented it to him via a friend of mine, Duane Hitchings, who is a songwriter who had a little studio. We went in his studio with his drum machines and his keyboards, and he made my chords sound better. We gave Rod a demo of the verses and the bridge, and Rod came up with the chorus. We played it with the band many, many ways before we got the correct arrangement with Tom Dowd. Unfortunately, they put so much stuff on it that it dwarfed the sound of the band. It made the band sound smaller because it had strings and two or three keyboard players, congas, and drums. When we were doing it, we thought it was going to be more like The Rolling Stones with just the band playing it. It came out and went to #1 everywhere."

The distinctive riff came from an instrumental song called "Taj Mahal" by a Brazilian musician named Jorge Ben. When Ben filed suit, Stewart agreed to give proceeds from the song to UNICEF. He later recalled in his book, Rod: The Autobiography: "I held my hand up straight away. Not that I'd stood in the studio and said, 'Here, I know: we'll use that tune from Taj Mahal as the chorus. The writer lives in Brazil, so he'll never find out.' Clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple." There is a blues guitarist named Taj Mahal who made his own version of the song using this same riff. The title, and also the only lyrics in the song, is "Jorge Ben."