Keith Richards Says the Rolling Stones Are Working on New Songs
Keith Richards confirmed that the Rolling Stones are working on some new tunes.
During an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, the legendary guitarist noted he’d been doing some songwriting alongside Mick Jagger and drummer Steve Jordan, who toured with the band last year following the death of Charlie Watts.
“It’ll be interesting to find out the dynamics now that Steve’s in the band,” Richards admitted. “It’s sort of metamorphosing into something else. I was working with Mick last week, and Steve, and we came up with some, eight or nine new pieces of material. Which is overwhelming by our standards. Other times, [songwriting is] like a desert.”
Asked why coming up with new material can be easier or harder at times, Richards shrugged. “It’s the muse thing,” the rocker explained. “If I could find her address (laughing).”
The Stones' last album, Blue & Lonesome, came out in 2015 and was made up of blues cover songs. You have to go all the way back to 2005’s A Bigger Bang to find the band’s last LP of original material. In 2021, the group released a 40th anniversary edition of their 1981 album Tattoo You, which included additional parts recorded recently by Watts prior to his death.
“Charlie did some work on just a few fills and stuff like that,” Jagger revealed in 2021, adding that it’d be tough to record new Stones songs without the drummer. “Without Charlie being there, it's going to be very difficult. And we've got tracks, which obviously have Charlie on them. But if we do new things, we won’t."
Jagger previously acknowledged a new Stones album was in the works. "It sounds good, what we’ve already done," the frontman noted in 2020, adding that they'd "recorded a bunch of tracks" around the same time as stand-alone single "Living in a Ghost Town."
Watch Keith Richards' Interview on 'CBS Sunday Morning'