Paul Mccartney joins Rolling Stones as Foreign Tongues debuts in New York
paul mccartney is on the guest list for the Rolling Stones’ 25th album, Foreign Tongues, and the band previewed it in New York on Tuesday afternoon. The rollout gives the record an early public test before release, with the Stones now working as a three-piece after Charlie Watts’s death in 2021.
New York hears Foreign Tongues
The Stones gathered friends, journalists and fellow artists for the event, where the audience included Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Odessa A’zion. For a band that has sold more than 250m albums, the guest list and the room itself signaled that Foreign Tongues is being positioned as a major release rather than a quiet catalog update.
Mick Jagger said the album has 14 songs and spans rock, ballads, country music and dance music. He also described Ringing Hollow as “a country tune” and Hit Me in the Head as “a real punk rocker,” while noting that parts of the latter were recorded by Charlie Watts before his death.
Andrew Watt in the room
Foreign Tongues was recorded with producer Andrew Watt, and Keith Richards made the studio relationship sound less ceremonial than the New York launch did. “When it’s not working, that’s when we bring in the referee,” he said, pointing at Watt, before adding, “He kicks us up the arse.”
Jagger said, “Only having four weeks gave us an urgency. We’re having fun most of the time in the studio, but it’s a lot of concentration too – you’ve really got to make [a song’s] five minutes count.” That short schedule lines up with the album’s broad mix of styles and the presence of Steve Winwood, Robert Smith and Chad Smith alongside McCartney.
Wood, Quinn and the cover
Ronnie Wood compared his interplay with Richards to “an ancient form of weaving,” a line that fits a group still treating arrangement and riff-work as craft rather than nostalgia. Richards also said, “Riffs, you can’t force them” and “They come to you,” which is about as close as the Stones get to explaining how they still generate new material this late in the run.
The cover art comes from New York-based artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, who described the image as an “amalgamation” of the band. Jagger called it “Mr Ugly” and added, “It’s not computer-generated,” a blunt reminder that the Stones still want the album package to look made by hand, not processed for streaming thumbnails.
O’Brien sets the tone
Conan O’Brien opened with “finally make it after decades of obscurity” and later said the album “kicks ass,” adding that it reminded him of Exile on Main St. He said he had listened to the record “25 times” since receiving it a few days earlier, which is about the strongest early signal the Stones could ask for from a host who was clearly there as a listener first and a celebrity second.
The practical takeaway is simple: Foreign Tongues is being introduced as a full-band statement with guest names that widen its reach, not as a legacy act coasting on reputation. With McCartney, Smith, Winwood and Chad Smith on board, the album now has the kind of credit list that can pull in rock listeners who usually wait for the first review cycle before paying attention.
