Life in the studio hasn’t always been straightforward for the Rolling Stones. But as the band prepares to drop their second album in three years, having released two in the last 20 before that, it’s safe to say they’ve hit a late-career hot streak.
With Andrew Watt behind the desk once more, and Paul McCartney guesting on his second consecutive Stones record, the British blues rockers are in a rich vein of form, and it seems the writing of Foreign Tongues was in stark contrast to some of their most celebrated records, which, behind the scenes, were sometimes lethargic and drug-addled, at other times tempestuous, or quite possibly a cocktail involving all three.
“It was done pretty quickly,” Mick Jagger tells Zane Lowe of the process that has defined the Stones’ operation in the 2020s. “On the last album, Hackney Diamonds, Andrew and I had a plan. We used to be in the studio and spend ages in there, all night, trying to make up songs that weren’t written, and so we said ‘We’re going for the bulldozer approach’ so no one has too much of a chance to take a song to pieces and say, ‘I don’t really like this, I don’t think it’s going to work.’
“We wanted to do it as fast as possible, and then people get into it, and they put their own stamp on it, change it, and make it better,” he explains. “And we more or less did the same thing here. You hope to get one and a half songs done; to get one done, and everyone knows the next one sort of thing. There were good vibes in there.”
It’s an approach that, admittedly, wouldn’t have been possible when the band relocated to the south of France as tax exiles, as they turned an idyllic villa basement into their makeshift recording studio in the early 1970s.
Keith Richards, the story goes, was so deep into a drug haze at that time that he didn’t even make it into the basement some days, and it was a drug debt that is said to have seen Nellcôte raided, and a score of guitars stolen. However, one has recently and miraculously reappeared. Regardless, it’s no wonder that, as critically acclaimed as Exile on Main St. would prove to be, Jagger calls it “lousy”.
Keef, who has also been speaking to Zane Lowe, was asked how the room a band records in affects the music and its quality.
“It can be very important, and you never know until you get in there and start playing,” he notes. “You’ll always get something out of it, but some rooms you have to fight, and others, you realize that they’re welcoming you in.
“At the same time,” he counters, “you get some really good records out of rooms that initially you’re feeling you’re having to fight with. When you’ve fought, and you’ve made up, they’ve got their own character.”
Richards was one of the driving force during the making of Exile, and looks at the album more fondly.
“I think it was the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” he told Guitar World in 2010. “It was an album album. All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America; we were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it.”
He admits that the cluster of material they took with them to France was “a work in progress,” with the band back then preferring to go the distance and thrash out the material on their own terms, and the “dusty” songs were, he says, very much a product of the environment.
With Jagger and Richards in their advancing years, it’s no surprise that the former is preferring a more wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach even if Richards is still spoiling for a fight.
“Nothing comes easy,” he says. “If it does, it’s not as good as it should be. There’s nothing like a tussle.”
The band has come a long way from the Beatles, who gifted them their first hit single. Watt is helping fuel the band’s latest resurgence, and he thinks he knows the recipe for a successful rock song.
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