One has to wonder if the creative side of Dave Stewart’s brain ever takes a rest. The multi-award winning British rocker (he and Annie Lennox were the Eurythmics) is a songwriter and collaborator with musical icons Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Bono, Gwen Stefani and Celine Dion. He's also a music producer, film-maker and an entrepreneur with such diverse partners as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and health and lifestyle guru Deepak Chopra.

Multi-talented Dave Stewart.

^{Photo by Wendy Lemlin}

Stewart’s career has extended over 25 years and more than 75 million album sales. But he is also a remarkable photographer, whose portraits of fellow musicians and celebrities are so compelling and artistic that they would command your attention if they were of everyday people, taken by an unknown.

Stewart was in town this week, appearing at the Morrison Hotel Gallery’s new digs at Del Mar’s Flower Hill Mall, for the opening of his photographic exhibition there, and to plug his new book, The Dave Stewart Songbook, Volume I, a coffee table tome of tales, photographs, sheet music, lyrics and an accompanying CD.

With the gallery packed to the rafters, Dave stood at a microphone and told the stories.

“The stories will probably get better if someone brings me a vodka martini,” he hinted. Someone did. Not only did the stories get better, but Stewart delighted the audience by picking up his guitar. He introduced Ann Marie Calhoun, an accomplished violinist he met through Ringo Starr, and throughout the evening, as he told his tales, the pair played snippets of some of his best known songs, often encouraging the crowd to sing along.

“I play all day, basically, that’s it, and I play with music, imagery, film and photographs, and a lot of the time I’m blessed with amazing musicians to play with me,” he says, as the pair launches into Eurythmics hits, Here Comes the Rain Again, and Sweet Dreams Are Made of These.

One of the most dramatic images in the show is a photo of Mick Jagger, a force of nature, bursting out of a stormy sky.

“Mick and I go back a long ways, maybe early to mid 80s," says Stewart. "We’d go out and about and get into many adventures and then we started writing songs together. And the more I got to know him, the more fascinated I became with this unbelievable electrically charged energy. He could go from a perfectly still, very thoughtful moment to suddenly, bang, Jumping Jack Flash! I wanted to take a photograph where I captured him as a lightening bolt flying through the air, coming out of a thunderous sky.”

In “Well Suited,” Demi Moore, in male drag with slicked back hair, sideburns and goatee, is stripping out of her man’s suit, exposing a very womanly chest. In this and most of the other photographs there’s the element of the double take. Stewart says: “I like the juxtaposition in photography or songwriting where everything sort of looks okay, but then you realize there’s something really out of place or odd with it, and I suppose it’s my take on the world, really. So most of my pictures kind of have this theme running through it, and sometime it’s an afterthought, or sometimes it’s pre-meditated.”

Dave Stewart thinks, “writing songs with other people is like falling in love over and over again. It’s a fast-track into somebody’s soul.” His photographs, on display through November 17, give us a glimpse into how he perceives not only those souls, but his own.