Fresh music from aging rockers

For decades, a new album by Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones would bestride pop culture like a colossus. Not so much now. Paul McCartney’s new The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Capitol) and the Rolling Stones’ new Foreign Tongues (Polydor) are getting props, but there’s a somewhat automatic feel to the enthusiasm, as if praising albums by McCartney and the Stones—at least when they’re not obvious misfires—is simply what one does.

In this case, however, the enthusiasm makes sense. Foreign Tongues finds Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and their carefully chosen sidemen and featured guests (Bruno Mars on cowbell!) committed to making sure the music, should it be the Stones’ last, doesn’t end their GOAT legacy with a dud. Producer Andrew Watt deserves special credit. It can’t be easy to capture the Stones’ unkempt mashup of country, blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul, funk, and mixed emotions in a way that makes their vintage mess sound contemporary. But Watt has. He has also made sure that Foreign Tongues passes the ultimate rock test: The louder you play it, the better it sounds. “Hit Me in the Head” is the most take-no-prisoners Stones song since “Respectable.”

As for the lyrics, Jagger recently told The New York Times Magazine that he hasn’t acquired much wisdom in his 83 years, so it’s inevitable that his latest verses reshuffle common Jaggerian motifs (with a few profanities to signify ongoing rebelliousness). Richards, on the other hand, has made no such admission, so the lyrics of his song “Some of Us,” which he says is about “people that have very large heads and very small hearts,” transcend mere functionality. (They’d have transcended it even more if Richards had actually managed to work “people that have very large heads and very small hearts” into the lyrics).

Andrew Watt produced The Boys of Dungeon Lane (with Paul McCartney) too. But sonically it shares little with Foreign Tongues, probably because instead of trying to touch on every facet of McCartney’s long and winding body of work, Watts honors his subject’s late-career interest in roads less traveled. McCartney isn’t in “experimental” mode (no Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest or Ecce Cor Meum vibes). But he does forgo the immediately irresistible pop hooks for which he’s best known, tapping instead subtler melodic impulses that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever stuck with his stronger deep cuts long enough for them to kick in.

He’s also waxing uncommonly—and unguardedly—nostalgic. The sepia-tinted sentiments of “Days We Left Behind,” “Down South,” “Home to Us” (with Ringo Starr), and “Salesman Saint” illuminate memories so precious to McCartney that he just has to share them while he can. And because he wants them to live on when he’s gone, he’s imbued them with the kind of tender gravitas most likely to endure.