THE ROLLING STONES · Blue & Lonesome | DIGI

Limited edition digipak.

Background information about 'Blue & Lonesome'

There is something almost mischievous about the way The Rolling Stones slipped back into the blues like a pair of worn-in leather boots. Recorded in just three days at British Grove Studios in London, "Blue & Lonesome" is the band's first full album of covers and their first studio record in over a decade — and it lands like a lightning bolt. No grand concept, no glossy production sheen, just five men plugging in and playing the music that first made them pick up guitars in the early sixties. Mick Jagger's harmonica wails like it has been waiting fifty years for this moment, while Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood trade licks with the loose, swaggering chemistry of guys who have been finishing each other's sentences since before most of us were born.

The songbook here is a love letter to the Chicago blues giants — Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed — but the Stones never treat these tunes like museum pieces. They attack them with the hunger of a bar band trying to win over a Friday night crowd. "Just Your Fool" kicks the door open with a grin, "Commit a Crime" simmers with menace, and the title track drags its feet through the Mississippi mud in the best possible way. Eric Clapton even drops by to add slide guitar on "Everybody Knows About My Good Thing", and the result feels less like a guest spot and more like old friends jamming after hours. It is raw, sweaty, spontaneous — the sound of a band rediscovering why they fell in love with this music in the first place.

For fans of: Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker

Track listing

1. Just Your Fool
2. Commit A Crime
3. Blue And Lonesome
4. All Of Your Love
5. I Gotta Go
6. Everybody Knows About My Good Thing
7. Ride 'em On Down
8. Hate To See You Go
9. Hoo Doo Blues
10. Little Rain
11. Just Like I Treat You
12. I Can't Quit You Baby

Manufacturer: Universal Music GmbH, Mühlenstrasse 25, 10997 Berlin, Germany, Contact: www.polydor.co.uk