The Rolling Stones guitarist’s first studio album outside his day job in 23 years opens with the short title fragment: Richards picking and singing a rare acoustic blues. It is rock’s most enduring outlaw evoking the Delta ghosts and early-country spirits that still haunt and inspire his life and band – and a perfect entry into a record that is at once loud, ragged delight, driven by Richards‘ trademark barbed-treble riffs, and shot through with a surprising, reflective urgency. “They laid it on thick/They couldn’t make it stick,” Richards sings with gravelly defiance in “Nothing on Me.” The guitarist also concedes the mounting price of age in “Amnesia,” a song about fading strength and memories. Keith Richards made Crosseyed Heart with reliable old friends including his late-Eighties side crew the X-Pensive Winos, singer Aaron Neville and the Stones’ late saxophonist Bobby Keys, whose robust playing, among his last on record, underscores Richards‘ admission here that there is an end to every ride – and his determination to make every mile count. –
The Fat Angel Sings 