2023: Sweet Sounds of Heaven - The Rolling Stones

Looking back at 30 years of music | The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan

“You have the sun; you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe - and you have the Rolling Stones” - Keith Richards

The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock and roll band of all time. Their legacy was already assured by the time they stopped releasing vital new music some time in the mid-to-late 1970s. It didn’t matter that from then on, their albums would contain only one or two good songs - as a rule, the top quality would come from the Keith Richards’ written-and-sung songs - and the rest would be nothing more than filler compared to the heights they had previously reached. They’d already released Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. They didn’t need to walk on water yet again to prove a point.

Their most important work in the last 50 years has been on the stage. They remain an exciting, electrifying and un-beatable band in concert. Mick Jagger works crowds of tens of thousands as if he was still on the tiny West-London club circuit stages where the Stones cut their teeth way back when. Keith Richards is still the epitome of cool, the embodiment and personification of the White Man’s Blues. Charlie Watts was the beating heart of the band to the very end.

Thanks to their legacy, whenever the Stones release a new album, there is always going to be a buzz. There will always be anticipation. What if, this time, they tap into the magic that they can still conjure on stage, but which for so long has abandoned them in the studio?

That magic made an appearance on the Richards numbers You Don’t Have to Mean It and How Can I Stop on 1997’s Bridges to Babylon, but was almost entirely absent from the 2005 follow up A Bigger Bang. Though the opener Rough Justice is classic swaggering Stones and sixth song Back of My Hand taps into their blues roots, the rest of the album feels uninspired and could have been made by just about any barroom band. It’s not a bad album, but it’s hardly a good one either, and not the kind of album that would win you the title of The Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

Blue & Lonesome, from 2016, was a real return to form. Despite the fact that there was not an original song in sight, this was the most Rolling Stones the Rolling Stones had sounded on an album in decades.

Almost as soon as the dust settled on this release, there were whispers that the group were working on original material again. The hope was that the Blue & Lonesome sessions had revitalised something in themselves as songwriters and would bring out the best in their writing, the way that their song selections had brought out the best in their playing. With only three albums of original material in the last thirty years, it felt like a big ask for another essential album from the group and as time went by with no new songs or releases, the hope that they could capitalise on the energy and quality of Blue & Lonesome ebbed away.

In 2020, a new song appeared. Living in a Ghost Town was an apt and timely return, with a funky groove and prescient lyrics about empty streets, isolation and being locked down. Still, the song didn’t lead to the release of a new record, but the whispers that they were back at work picked up again.

Finally, in 2023, another new song appeared. Much like Living in a Ghost Town, Angry is a very competent latter-day Rolling Stones track. It’s got a catchy riff, strong beat, swaggering and cocksure vocal. It’s not alive in the way that Brown Sugar or Can’t You Hear Me Knocking are, but it’s not as flat and lifeless or as sloppy as A Bigger Bang, either. All in all, it felt like about as good as you could hope a late Rolling Stones song could be.

That is, until Sweet Sounds of Heaven came along.

From the very first seconds, you can sense you’re about to hear something powerful. You can feel that there was magic in the room when they recorded this. A gospel-style piano rolls in, the drums kick into life and a guitar quietly recalls a whisper of Sympathy for the Devil.

The song slowly builds into a mighty force over seven and a half moving minutes. Complete with church organ, choir and horns, the track feels important. It feels vital. It feels like it is a real, living and breathing entity. It feels life-changing. It feels like The Truth. It feels worthy, finally, of The Rolling Stones’ legacy.

Although they are traditionally a blues band, it’s that ability to tap into the gospel styles that elevated their work above most of their British invasion counterparts. They were more than a blues band, they were more than rock and roll group, they were more than a tribute band to the great American music forms. They were a soul group. They were a funk band. They moved with the spirit of all that inside them and channelled it all into new directions. That’s why they were so adept at moving from the raucous rock of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction into the spiritual energy of Gimme Shelter, and it is that spiritual energy that is running right through the beating heart of Sweet Sounds of Heaven.

So much of the blues mythology is based around the image of the crossroads. And it is at the crossroads - between the heaven of gospel and the devilish hell of rock and roll and the blues - where The Rolling Stones have always made their very best music. Sweet Sounds of Heaven is among their very best songs.

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Elsewhere in the Year

On November 2nd, 2023, my girlfriend and I gathered around her phone which was tuned to BBC Radio 2. Just like people had come together around the radio to listen to the latest releases from The Beatles sixty years before, we were anxiously waiting to hear the new, and final, song by the most important band in popular music history.

It doesn’t matter that they broke up in 1969 and hadn’t released a new album since 1970, Beatlemania is alive and well. We were just two of millions who were eagerly awaiting the new song, Now and Then. Around the world the track debuted on the radio stations and was quickly launched onto the streaming platforms, where it racked up millions of streams and eventually topped the UK charts. There was a short documentary and music video to accompany the single, as well as all the media buzz that a new Beatles song duly created.

Half the members of the group may be gone from this world, but through perseverance from the surviving members and some technological trickery, the best band of all time were re-united in the studio for the first time since August 20, 1969, when they put the finishing touches to I Want You (She’s So Heavy). And, just like that song, this is another John Lennon composition. With his lyrics, vocal and piano, taken from a latter-day Lennon demo, Now and Then, is an aching lament to lost love, companionship and collaboration which makes the re-uniting of the band to complete it all the more poignant.

The story is so great, galvanising and heart-warming that it almost doesn’t matter what the song sounds like. Although, it’s The Beatles, so of course it’s perfect.

Completing the hat-trick of 2023 releases from The Big Three of 1960’s revolutionary rockers was Bob Dylan, with his Shadow Kingdom soundtrack album. Fourteen songs from Dylan’s 2021 kind-of concert film / fever-dream of the same name, it was great to get an official release of this one.

Featuring the definitive studio versions of When I Paint My Masterpiece, Queen Jane Approximately, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, Forever Young and Watching the River Flow, Dylan is in great voice as he breathes new life into these old favourites. A mature work, with rich and warm instrumentation, the film may have been confounding, but the album is more of a comfort.

More than either the Stones or the surviving members of The Beatles, Dylan has forged a new style for himself as he has aged, updating his sound to suit his aging voice and adapting his art and performance in kind. Whilst Jagger and McCartney try and hit the same notes and moves they did 60 years ago in the 60s, Dylan has updated his songs and his style to suit the way he sings now, to suit the way he feels now and who he is now. Whilst the others rely mainly on older, more famous material to make up the majority of their setlists in concert, Dylan fills his shows with new songs which are often as good as or even better than the greatest hits that he rarely plays.

For all their differences, though, each of these three rolled back the years, in their way, in their new releases in 2023. We are so lucky to still have them all, and even luckier that they are all still creating such incredible new music for us to enjoy.

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Notable Album Releases

Boygenius - The Record

Chappell Roan - The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

Kali Uchis - Red Moon in Venus

Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

Miley Cyrus - Endless Summer Vacation

Mitski - The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We

Olivia Rodrigo - GUTS

Paramore - This is Why

Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

SZA - SOS

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Next up: The last instalment of the series.

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