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10190 - KEITH RICHARDS - CROSSEYED HEART (2015)

KEITH RICHARDS
''CROSSEYED HEART''
SEPTEMBER 18 2015
57:35

1 Cross Eyed Heart (Keith Richards) 01:52
2 Heartstopper (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:04
3 Amnesia (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:35
4 Robbed Blind (Keith Richards) 04:00
5 Trouble (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 04:17
6 Love Overdue (Gregory Isaacs) 03:28
7 Nothing On Me (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:48
8 Suspicious (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:42
9 Blues in the Morning (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 04:26
10 Something for Nothing (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:28
11 Illusion (Norah Jones, Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 03:48
12 Just a Gift (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 04:01
13 Goodnight Irene (Huddie Ledbetter, John A. Lomax) 05:15
14 Substantial Damage (Steve Jordan, Keith Richards) 04:21
15 Lover's Plea (Steve Jordan, David Porter, Keith Richards) 04:22

Clifton Anderson/Trombone
Kevin Batchelor/Trumpet
Larry Campbell/Fiddle, Pedal Steel, Violin
Ben Cauley/Trumpet
Blondie Chaplin/Vocals (Background)
Sarah Dash/Vocals (Background)
Pierre de Beauport/Guitar (Acoustic)
Charles Dougherty/Sax (Tenor)
Babi Floyd/Vocals (Background)
Bernard Fowler/Vocals (Background)
Jack Hale/Trombone
Harlem Gospel Choir
Charles Hodges/Organ (Hammond), Piano
Jim Horn/Sax (Baritone)
Norah Jones/Vocals
Steve Jordan/Congas, Drums, Horn Arrangements, Percussion, Piano, Timpani, Vibraphone, Vocals (Background)
Bobby Keys/Saxophone
Lannie McMillan/Sax (Tenor)
Aaron Neville/Vocals (Background)
Ivan Neville/Organ (Hammond), Vocals (Background), Wurlitzer
Paul Nowinski/Bass, Gamba, Viola
Spooner Oldham/Organ (Hammond)
David Paich/Organ
Pino Palladino/Bass
Keith Richards/Bass, Guitar (Acoustic), Guitar (Electric), Keyboards, Organ, Piano, Sitar (Electric), Tiple, Vocals, Vocals (Background), Wurlitzer
Lester Snell/Horn Arrangements
Meegan Voss/Vocals (Background)
Waddy Wachtel/Guitar (Acoustic), Guitar (Electric), Slide Guitar, Soloist, Vocals (Background)

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REVIEW/AMG
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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. When compared to that publication date, Crosseyed Heart arrives a mere five years later, so that's not such a long wait. Certainly, Crosseyed Heart hardly feels like it was labored over; it's not the work of a perfectionist hoping every element lands in its right place. It sounds like it was knocked out in a week, which is about the highest compliment that can be paid to a record as casual as this. Main Offender felt like the result of endless hours of expensive studio jams, but Crosseyed Heart feels like it fell into place, with its songs arising out of jams with a drummer instead of being excuses for jams. Bookended by acoustic numbers -- the first is the charmingly tossed-off title track, a song that feels clipped in its conclusion, the last a version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene," with the lyrics slightly modified -- the album does indeed bear the suggestion of a construction, a record that slides from obsession to obsession without calling attention to transitions. Nothing here is surprising, not the overdriven Chess boogie of "Blues in the Morning" or the ska shuffle of "Love Overdue," but that familiarity is an asset, because Keith luxuriates in his detours so much he winds up synthesizing his affections into a signature, a move highlighted by the soulful crawl of the Norah Jones duet "Illusion," a song where both singers seem seduced by the slow groove. "Illusion" mildly recalls "Make No Mistake," but where that Talk Is Cheap number underlined its Stax connections, Crosseyed Heart isn't so edgy: 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.

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BIOGRAPHY/AMG
by Steve Huey
He's acknowledged as perhaps the greatest rhythm guitarist in rock & roll, but Keith Richards is even more legendary for his near-miraculous ability to survive the most debauched excesses of the rock & roll lifestyle. His prodigious consumption of drugs and alcohol has been well documented, and would likely have destroyed anyone with a less amazing endurance level. On-stage with the Rolling Stones, he epitomized guitar-hero cool as the quiet, stoic alter ego to Mick Jagger's extroverted frontman, a widely imitated image made all the more fascinating by his tightrope-walking hedonism. Yet that part of Richards' mystique often overshadows his considerable musical legacy. Arguably the finest blues-based rhythm guitarist to hit rock & roll since his idol Chuck Berry, Richards knocked out some of the most indelible guitar riffs in history, and he did it so often and with such apparent effortlessness that it was easy to take his songwriting skills for granted. His lean, punchy, muscular sound was the result of his unerring sense of groove and intuitive use of space within songs, all of which played a major part in laying the groundwork for hard rock. Never intensely interested in soloing, Richards preferred to work the groove using open-chord tunings drawn from the Delta blues, and his guitars were often strung with only five strings for cleaner fingering, which made it difficult for cover bands to duplicate his distinctive sound precisely. For all his rock-star notoriety, Richards was perfectly happy in the confines of a group, and thus was the last Rolling Stone to release a side-project solo album; his 1988 solo debut appeared more than a quarter century after he co-founded the band that earned him the nickname "Mr. Rock & Roll."

Richards was born December 18, 1943, in Dartford, Kent, on the southern outskirts of London. When he was just an infant, his family had to be temporarily evacuated from their home during the Nazi bombing campaign of 1944. In 1951, while attending primary school, Richards first met and befriended Jagger, although they would be split up three years later when they moved on to different schools. By this age, Richards had already become interested in music, and was an especially big fan of Roy Rogers; in his very early adolescence, he sang in a choir that performed for the Queen herself, although he was forced to quit when his voice changed. Around that time, he became interested in American rock & roll and began playing guitar, with initial guidance from his grandfather. Behavior problems at school led to Richards' expulsion in 1959, but the headmaster thought he might find a niche as an artist, and Richards was sent to Sidcup Art School. There he met future Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor, who at the time was playing in a blues band with Jagger. Discovering their new mutual interest, Richards and Jagger struck up their friendship all over again, and Richards joined their band not long after. Over the next couple of years, that band evolved into the Rolling Stones, who officially debuted on-stage in the summer of 1962 (by which time Richards had left school).

The rest was history -- initially a blues and R&B covers band, the Stones branched out into original material penned by Jagger and Richards. The duo took some time and practice to develop into professional-quality songwriters, but by 1965 they'd hit their stride. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" made them superstars in the States as well as the U.K., boasting one of rock's all-time great guitar riffs, which Richards played into a tape recorder in the middle of the night and didn't recall writing when he heard the tape the next morning. With their menacing, aggressively sexual image, the Stones became targets for British police bent on quelling this new threat to public decency, and Richards suffered his first drug bust in 1967 when police raided his residence and found amphetamines in the coat pocket of Jagger's girlfriend, singer Marianne Faithfull. Richards was convicted of allowing the activity on his premises and sentenced to a year in prison, but public furor over the trumped-up nature of the charges and the purely circumstantial evidence prompted a hasty reversal of the decision. The same year, Richards hooked up with bandmate Brian Jones' former girlfriend, model/actress Anita Pallenberg; although the two never officially married, they remained together (more or less) for the next 12 years, and had two children (Marlon, in 1968, and Angela, in 1972).

After the death of Brian Jones in 1969, the Stones became a more straightforward, hard-rocking outfit, and Richards' guitar took center stage more than ever before. By this era, he'd taken to calling himself Keith Richard, simply because he thought it sounded better without the s. Privately, the band was sinking further into decadence, clearly audible on its early-'70s masterpieces Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St.. However, Richards' burgeoning heroin addiction began to affect the consistency of the band's recordings for the next few years. Additionally, he ran into more legal troubles; his French villa was the subject of a drug raid in 1972, as was his British residence the following year. (Rumors dating from this era that Richards had all of his blood replaced in a cleanup effort, while entertaining, were not true.) Over 1976-1977, Richards entered the studio for a few solo sessions, but the only result to see the light of day was the Christmas single "Run Rudolph Run" (issued in 1978). Perhaps the lack of productivity was due to the fact that Richards was in the middle of the most difficult period of his life.

In 1976, Richards' infant son Tara, his third child by Pallenberg, died suddenly; the official cause was SIDS, although unsubstantiated rumors about the couple's drug abuse playing a factor circulated as well. In early 1977, Richards was busted for coke, and faced the most serious charges of his life when, in Toronto, he was caught in possession of heroin. He narrowly escaped serving jail time, agreeing to perform a charity concert for the blind and enter drug rehabilitation in the United States. The scare convinced him to clean up, and when the Stones returned in 1978 with Some Girls, it was acclaimed as their strongest, most focused work in years, and helped rejuvenate their popularity as an arena rock attraction. Things went sailing along smoothly for the next few years, and Richards even officially married for the first time in 1983, wedding Patti Hansen, who would bear him two more daughters, Theodora and Alexandra (he and Pallenberg had finally split in 1979). However, around the same time, Jagger decided the Stones should take a new direction more in line with contemporary pop; Richards refused, and Jagger embarked on a solo career that began to take priority over the Stones. It ignited a very public feud between the two, and rumors of the Stones' imminent demise swirled over the next few years. When Jagger refused to tour behind 1986's Dirty Work in order to record his second solo album, Richards retaliated by going out on his own, forming a backing band he dubbed the Xpensive Winos.

Richards released his first solo album, Talk Is Cheap, in 1988. Both critically and commercially, it was a far greater success than Jagger's Primitive Cool. Reviews were generally quite complimentary, calling it a solid rock & roll record; plus, buoyed by the minor hit single and MTV favorite "Take It So Hard," Talk Is Cheap went gold. Richards embarked on a supporting tour that produced the concert album Live at the Hollywood Palladium, released three years later, and his success convinced Jagger to return to the fold (of course, the relative failure of his own solo venture helped). Their future thus seemingly assured, the Stones had their biggest success in some time with the 1989 album Steel Wheels and its blockbuster supporting tour. In the early '90s, Richards and Jagger once again began working on solo projects, but this time with the understanding that nothing took precedence over the Stones; Richards' second studio album, Main Offender, was issued in 1992, and again received fairly solid notices, although it didn't get quite the same commercial exposure.

Richards returned to the Rolling Stones for 1994's Voodoo Lounge and then spent the better part of the next two decades within the Stones' orbit as they regularly toured and sometimes recorded. After 2005's A Bigger Bang, studio work for the Stones slowed -- they'd polish up some outtakes for deluxe reissues of Exile on Main St. and Some Girls in the 2010s -- allowing Richards to pursue some extracurricular activities. He appeared on various records, usually ones made by his blues or rock heroes, and had a cameo as Johnny Depp's pirate father in 2007's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. His next big project was the publication of his weighty autobiography Life in October 2010. Acclaimed as one of the best rock memoirs, Life was a hit and helped shore up Richards' reputation as a sharp, incisive musician and raconteur. The Rolling Stones began to celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2012, playing a handful of big shows, and they continued touring into 2015. During all this, Richards began work on his third album, once again playing with his band the X-Pensive Winos. Entitled Crosseyed Heart, the record saw release on September 18, 2015, accompanied by the release of a documentary called Under the Influence.

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