Description
Keith Richards took his time to complete Crosseyed Heart. It arrives 23 years after Main Offender, his last solo studio album, but also 11 years after A Bigger Bang, the last official Rolling Stones record, but Richards hasn’t exactly been quiet in all those years. He helped Mick Jagger flesh out the leftover demos for expanded editions of Exile on Main St. and Some Girls — conspiracists argued some of the writing happened in the new millennium — and toured with the Stones on various anniversaries, but the feather in his cap was Life, the 2010 memoir that established Keith as a razor-sharp raconteur for the masses that may never have paid attention to Talk Is Cheap. Keith no longer has to prove what he has to contribute to either the Stones or the culture at large, so he settles into his favorite sounds, loving to play the blues, rock & roll, country, and folk he’s always savored, then sliding into the open-chord boogie that’s unmistakably his. He may not forcibly claim this ground here but that’s the appeal of Crosseyed Heart: it’s a winningly low-key record, where the atmosphere matters more than the songs, yet Richards doesn’t neglect writing tunes this time around.
