Keith Richards on Crosseyed Heart, his first new solo album in almost 25 years
At the age of 71 and with a new solo album and a documentary to promote, the Rolling Stone is back in fine form
“I’ve been on this [The Rolling Stones’ Zip Code] tour, and that’s numero uno – the gig,” Richards, 71, says good-naturedly while sitting on a sofa in his manager’s office.
But now that the Stones are between tours, Richards’ wait can end. The album was released on Friday, and he’s eyeing the possibility of solo shows this autumn, maybe even a short tour now that the Stones’ next round of shows, in South America, has been pushed from October and November into January. Richards says the Stones plan to record a new album after the end of the tour.
Richards started working on what would become Crosseyed Heart in 2011, about the time his autobiography, Life, was becoming an international bestseller.
“The book was the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” says Richards, shaking his head. “And you think the record world is bad? The book world is incredible. They’ve been at it longer.”
The process of retracing his life dovetailed neatly with writing new songs with his co-producer and main collaborator, drummer Steve Jordan. Richards began flexing the compositional muscles he hadn’t used much with the Stones since the band’s most recent album of new material, 2005’s A Bigger Bang.
“We actually didn’t start off to make an album, per se,” he says. “We said: ‘Let’s go in and cut a few tracks and see what happens.’
“After about three or four months – we could only do this once a week, sometimes once a month, really; there was no ‘project’ – we suddenly realised we had half an album. At that point,” Richards says through what often sounds like a handful of gravel in his throat, “we said: ‘We might as well go in whole hog.’”
Illusion is one of a half-dozen ballads on the album, a shift in pacing that marks one of the major differences between a Richards solo effort and his work with the Stones. “Mick is not a big one for ballads,” he says with a chuckle. “But I do love ballads. Always have. I didn’t write Angie for nothing, or Ruby Tuesday.”
Richards’ honesty about his long-time bandmate and songwriting partner carries through to his assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses. About his vocal limitations, Richards says: “I’m always dodgy about my voice. It’s usually because I don’t sing a lot.
He also includes a hauntingly spare version of blues legend Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene. Richards has turned to the original lyrics, which paint a more harrowing picture than the song gets in the usual campfire sing-along renditions, including the line: “I’m gonna take morphine and die.”
That was just his second solo effort, after Talk is Cheap in 1988, which belatedly established his solo identity a quarter century after the Stones emerged during the British Invasion as the dark and dangerous counterpart to The Beatles.
Topics on Crosseyed Heart run the gamut from lustful romance (the title track) to forgiveness and renewal (Heartstopper) to near-comic real-life mishaps (Amnesia) and the importance of honesty in a relationship (Illusion). Amnesia refers to a tumble Richards took in 2006 while he was in Fiji, where it was widely reported that he’d fallen out of a tree. “Knocked on my head/ Everything went blank/ I didn’t even know the Titanic sank/ How can I regret/ It’s so easy to forget … I can’t recall the past, I’m nowhere.”
Asked if there are things about his life he regrets, at first he jokes, “I don’t know. I forgot them.”
Then he pauses, his voice dropping into a more sombre tone. “I lost a son,” he says referring to his two-month-old son, Tara Jo Jo Gunne, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1976. “But I don’t know if that comes in the realm of regret. It’s a sorrow.”
“What made the film so much fun is that he’s in such a good place now,” Neville says. “He doesn’t worry about anything. He’s such an honest person; it’s rare for a famous person to be that open and honest. That’s liberating.”
Neville took an Academy Award for his 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, a homage to back-up singers who often remain in the shadows of various rock stars, including the Stones.
With Under the Influence, Neville says his aim was “to make sure the documentary was timeless in its own way, that it wasn’t rooted in the album”.
“In fact, I realised later we don’t even mention the name of the album in the film. It’s not tied to it in that way,” he says. “It’s more about where he’s at and the process of making the album.”
Like the album, the film came together serendipitously. Neville says Richards’ manager, Jane Rose, had commissioned him to film an interview in lieu of asking him to undertake an extensive round of media sessions to promote the album. But it’s not a major undertaking for Richards to swing by Rose’s office for interviews, since it’s just a few hours from Connecticut, where he lives with his wife of 32 years, former model Patti Hansen.
“As a music geek, it was kind of the documentary I’ve been training for my whole life,” Neville says. “If you started out trying to make a documentary like this, to do all the research you’d need to do to prepare for it, you couldn’t. You have to have spent 20 or 30 years as a music obsessive to play in the same game as Keith.”
Neville showed up for the first filming session with a stack of vinyl records and started mining Richards’ passion for old blues, rock, R&B, country, folk and gospel music.
Does that mean Neville can now check “hanging out with Keith” off his own bucket list? “There’s the bucket list,” Neville says, “and there are other things too unimaginable to even make your bucket list. This is one of those.”
Los Angeles Times