The Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome (2xLP)

Stones return to blues roots! Their first studio album in more than a decade!

Blue & Lonesome pressed on two 180-gram LPs, housed in a double gatefold sleeve

Coming December 2016, The Rolling Stones return to their blues roots with Blue & Lonesome, their first studio album in more than a decade! The 12 album tracks are all covers of songs by classic bluesmen.

Produced by Don Was and The Glimmer Twins, Blue & Lonesome takes the band back to their passion for blues music which has always been at the heart and soul of The Rolling Stones. The album was recorded throughout the course of just three days in December 2015 at British Grove Studios in West London, just a stone's throw from Richmond and Eel Pie Island where the group started out as a young blues act playing pubs and clubs.

Their approach to the album was that it should be spontaneous and played live in the studio without overdubs. The band — Mick Jagger (vocals & harp), Keith Richards (guitar), Charlie Watts (drums), and Ronnie Wood (guitar) were joined by their long time touring sidemen Darryl Jones (bass), Chuck Leavell (keyboards) and Matt Clifford (keyboards) and, for two of the 12 tracks, by old friend Eric Clapton, who happened to be in the next studio making his own album. Clapton guests on the group's cover of Little Johnny Taylor's "Everybody Knows About My Good Thing" and Otis Rush's "I Can't Quit You Baby."

Blue & Lonesome sees the Rolling Stones tipping their hats to their early days as a blues band when they played the music of Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, Eddie Taylor, Little Walter and Howlin' Wolf — artists whose songs are featured on this album. "This album is manifest testament to the purity of their love for making music, and the blues is, for the Stones, the fountainhead of everything they do," longtime associate and album co-producer Don Was notes.

Was revealed in an interview with the French publication Le Figaro (via Ultimate Classic Rock) that the Stones had recorded the LP live in the studio with the musicians in a circle surrounding microphones. "The record sounds very crude, very authentic," he said. "It captures the essence of what they are."