Rod Stewart's Rocky Year

By Stephen M. Silverman

05/27/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

Last year, rocker Rod Stewart has only just revealed, he was less interested in asking the musical question, "D'Ya Think I'm Sexy" and asking instead, "D'Ya Think I'm Healthy." In an interview with New York's Daily News, the veteran musician, 56, whose trademark is his raspy voice, said that a lump had to be removed from his throat last April, shortly after he finished work on his new album, "Human." "They found this little growth, a node, on my thyroid," Stewart, referring to his doctors, said of a medical examination of a routine CAT scan. "I thought I'd better get it cut out in case it was cancerous." It was not, as it turned out, Still, Stewart said, in the course of the operation, surgeons "slice all the way through your throat, which doesn't do the muscles that control your vocal chords any good." He added, "it's been a while getting the voice back to what it was" -- months, in fact. But come back it has. "It's almost like learning to walk again," said Stewart. "For a while, I thought maybe I should become a landscape artist."