'Blue & Lonesome': How the Rolling Stones Went Back to the Blues Roots They Started With

In 2016 the Rolling Stones released an album of twelve blues covers recorded in just three days at British Grove Studios in London. It was a deliberate, almost defiant return to the music that formed them as teenagers in early-’60s London—the raw Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and Little Walter. The title itself, Blue & Lonesome, comes from a 1959 Little Walter instrumental, and the whole project was, as Keith Richards put it, “just a bunch of guys getting together and having a blast” playing the songs they’d been playing since before they were famous.

The recording approach was radically simple for a band of their size. No overdubs, no click tracks, no fixing things after the fact. They set up in the studio like a live band: Mick Jagger singing and playing harp into the room, Keith and Ronnie Wood’s guitars bleeding into each other, Charlie Watts and Darryl Jones locking in immediately. The only concession was Eric Clapton, who happened to be recording in the next room and wandered in to play on two tracks. Everything was captured in one or two takes, often with mistakes left in—same way the blues records they idolized were made in the ’50s. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was muscle memory.