Last week I bought Keith Richard’s new album “Crosseyed Heart” on vinyl. [1] It’s a low-key, great sounding record with a strong set of songs.
The album is mostly the creation of Keith and drummer Steve Jordan (with the Winos and other guests mixed in later). Steve Jordan is the perfect foil for solo Keith. Jordan inspires and complements him in a way that coaxes out of him an album’s worth of songs. During the new Netflix documentary “Under The Influence” Jordan relates a conversation with Keith where he apparently talked him out of “retirement” and into making this album. The process began with just Richards and Jordan booking studio time to cut a few tracks.
It’s been 25 years since his last album and my initial reaction was, similar to how I felt about “Talk Is Cheap” in 1987, “why the Stones don’t put out albums like this anymore”. Which is not really fair. I went back and listened to “Steel Wheels”, “Voodoo Lounge” and “Bridges to Babylon” and there’s some good stuff on those albums. These records are at least as good as some of the so-so mid-seventies albums like “Goats Head Soup” or “Black and Blue”. The problem, as I’ve noted before, is that the Stones are competing with their classic albums of the late sixties and seventies. Nothing will measure up. But this is a Keith Richards album not a Rolling Stones record so that burden of comparison is lifted.
The other thing that makes this album work is that Keith is acting his age.[2] There is something Peter Pan about Jagger that makes him appear sometimes as the boy who can’t grow up, who is trying to recapture his lost youth. Keith doesn’t have this problem. He’s become one of the old bluesmen he idolized in his youth. Keith isn’t trying to re-create the past and he is totally in the moment. Like any true artist, he is authentic and true to himself and his collaborators. If the album sells great and if not that’s ok too. Keith is doing this for the love of his art and is not trying to please the audience.
The album’s fifteen songs range from quiet, acoustic blues (title track), shuffling electric blues (“Blues In The Morning”), all-out rockers (“Trouble, “Substantial Damage”) and ballads (“Illusions”, a duet with Nora Jones). The playing is assured but never showy with an ensemble feel, which is a neat trick considering, Keith plays most of the instruments (other than drums). “Trouble” and “Nothing On Me” sound like they were lifted from one of the Stone’s seventies albums. There’s an alternating feel of space and density with the songs that reminds me of “Exile” and “Sticky Fingers”.
In the end Keith is a loyal Stone who would always prefer to be onstage or in the studio with them. It seems he is forced into making solo albums in those infrequent times when things with the Stones were uncertain (the late eighties feud with Jagger) or during extended dormant periods (the last few years). “Crosseyed Heart” is a side project and not a big album. But it’s a musicians’ album made by someone for a deep love for blues, country and rock and roll. And for that we are ever thankful for these occasional solo offerings from Keith.
[1] Interesting thing about current artists, that are from the CD age with its expanded space for music, putting out vinyl versions of their releases is that they are too long for a single album but aren’t really long enough for a double album. I’ve bought vinyl albums recently that take up three sides and the fourth side is not playable and has some kind of design on it. Keith’s new album takes up four relatively short sides. The CD age increased the amount of music that could fit on an LP. Years later I am still of the mind that this “all the news that fits” approach yields too much filler than being forced to edit a ten-song collection to fit on the LP.
[2] Robert Plant has also made this transition from the “golden god” of his seventies heyday with Led Zeppelin to today’s rhythm and blues band leader.