Keith Richards Back At Work On New Rolling Stones Album

Keith Richards revealed he's currently back at work at Manhattan's Germano Studios recording the still-unfinished Rolling Stones studio set. He told Rolling Stone, “I realized coming into the studio yesterday that I was in this room in very early March, and we were just doing what we were doing and the next day, s*** hit the fan (laughs). So yesterday I had that déjà vu feeling. At the moment, I’m just overjoyed to be working. There’s not a lot of work out there, y'know?”

He went on to talk about how the Stones have been connecting since each of them has been in their own private lockdown: “We’re communicating from across the Atlantic and then waiting for a vaccine. I have thousands of songs. I got enough to keep me busy.”

When pressed on his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement, Richards said: “It’s about bloody time. I mean, in this country things are coming to a head. That’s the way it is. You got to deal with it. It’s difficult for me to talk about it, because I am not an American. I live here, I am in heart and soul, I am one of you, but I can’t interfere. I’m like (Vladimir) Putin, I refuse to interfere in your electoral process.”

Richards was asked about what songwriting rules he adheres to: “When you’re writing songs, there are no f***ing rules. In fact, you’re looking to break them. You’re looking to sort of find the next missing chord. You’re looking to find the next best way to express things. Writing songs is not about the lyrics one side and music on another. It’s about the two coming together. And you can be a great poet and you might write some lovely music, but the art and the beauty of writing songs is to pull those two together, where they seem to love each other, and that’s writing songs.”

He went on to laugh when asked about what recent rock n' roll is currently “moving him”: “There is no new rock n' roll (laughs). It’s pointless. There’s great musicians and some great singers and stuff. Unfortunately, to me, in music, it’s been synthesized to death. Once you start synthesizing things, you’re not getting the real thing. But I don’t want to go into a long discourse on what’s wrong with synthesizers and music these days, except to say they’re cheap and corny (laughs).”

Keith Richards admitted that he's never been one to keep his pulse on what's going down in the clubs or in the charts: “I’m not particularly interested with ‘catching up with the latest’ — but then, I never was. Most of the stuff that I ever played was stuff that I’d heard from guys who were much older than me. In other words, I was never a big pop freak, (laughs) until suddenly I found myself a pop star. Music, it’s all out there, you can listen to it and it depends what grabs ya. I mean, being a musician, I listen for music. That’s what I do, y’know?”

On Wednesday (October 28th) Mick Jagger posted a clip of himself on Instagram performing along to a track called “Pride Before A Fall,” which is presumably from the latest Stones sessions.