Blue & Lonesome: The Rolling Stones’ Surprise Blues Detour That Critics Called a Return to Form

In December 2016, the Rolling Stones released Blue & Lonesome — a set of twelve blues covers recorded in just three days in London. The album arrived with practically no buildup, and yet it became their first UK No. 1 studio album in over twenty years. Critics, many of whom had written off the Stones as a legacy act, were almost universally impressed. Mojo called it their best album since Some Girls; Rolling Stone gave it four stars and noted the band sounded “hungry and loose” for the first time in decades.

The interesting thing is that it wasn’t a “return to form” in the usual sense — no Jagger-Richards originals, no attempt to recapture the 1970s. Instead, the band went straight back to the Chicago blues that sparked their career in 1962. Songs like Willie Dixon’s “Just Your Fool” and Jimmy Reed’s “Little Rain” were played live in the studio with minimal overdubs. Critics saw the album not as a nostalgic retreat but as a reminder of why the Stones mattered in the first place: they were always, at heart, a blues covers band that happened to write some of the greatest rock songs ever.

Comparisons to earlier Stones albums were inevitable, but the praise had a different flavor. Rather than measuring Blue & Lonesome against Exile on Main St., reviewers framed it as a palate cleanser — proof the band still had that spark when they stripped away the stadiums and the hype. It didn’t hurt that the closing track, “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” featured Eric Clapton on guitar and sounded like a lost Chess Records session. So yes, it was seen as a