The new Rolling Stones song, "Living in a Ghost Town,” was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards a year ago and recorded in Los Angeles.
Jagger tells Apple Music, “It wasn’t written for now, but it was just one of those odd things. It was written about being in a place which was full of life but is now bereft of life so to speak… I was just jamming on the guitar and wrote it really quickly in like 10 minutes.
“Keith and I both had the idea that we should release it. But I said, ‘Well I’ve got to rewrite it.’ Some of it is not going to work and some of it was a bit weird and a bit too dark. So I slightly rewrote it. I didn’t have to rewrite very much, to be honest. It’s very much how I originally did it."
And Keith adds, “It’s sort of eerie when suddenly it’s coming to life. I mean the ghost comes to life… I had said to [producer] Don [Was] about a month or so ago, ‘Hey, this is a time for the ghost town track.’ And then Mick called me and said the same thing and that great minds think alike.”
So when might we see a new Stones album? Jagger says, "I don’t just want it to be a good album, I want it to be great. I’m very hard on myself. If I write something or if I write something with Keith or whatever, it’s going to be great. It can’t just be good."
And Keith says there is a certain vibe to what they're working in. "We’ve got another five or six tracks and there’s a lot of sort of soul feel about it for some reason without anybody intending to. Obviously right now we’ve got nothing else to do but write some more songs, right?”
Their last album of original material was A Bigger Bang in 2005.
Source: RollingStones.com and Premiere
photo credit - iHR archive