The Rolling Stones will release their new album Foreign Tongues this Friday. I wrote a bit about it here. One track I didn’t mention is “Ringing Hollow,” the latest (and last?) song to get a pre-release preview treatment — not under an alias or with a star–studded video, but via an old-fashioned stripped-down performance.
The Stones held a listening party for Foreign Tongues Wednesday at the St. Clement Hotel in London. At the event, Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, and touring keyboardist Matt Clifford surprised the crowd with a quick acoustic performance. Before playing “Dead Flowers” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” they debuted “Ringing Hollow,” a song lamenting the current state of the United States, highlighted by the lyric “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown.”
On their press tour promoting the new album, the Stones have made a point of discussing America’s decline. Their Mojo feature includes extensive remarks about “Ringing Hollow,” including this from Jagger:
It’s about America as an idea. The American Dream is intact for some people, and I’m sure we can find some wonderful immigrant stories that happened in the last 12 months, but we read about the decline of the American Empire. Is the Iran war America’s Suez moment? Well, it’s not the same at all, but there are a lot of questions about imperial overreach, and the lobbying system. The money spent on an election is absurd – it’s not corruption per se but unnecessary. Is it indicative of this administration, or is it something has been happening a long time? In any case, it’s not the same place as it was.
He added:
I lived in New York for 19 years. I’ve seen lots of America that no Americans have seen because people on the coast never go to the clapped-out towns, the middle and the south. Every English band had a love affair with America. The Beatles retained their northern thing, and then John fell in love with New York.
Keith Richards also chimed in:
I take “Ringing Hollow” to be about America when we were growing up in the ’50s. The romance of it all: have a cocktail, smoke your cigarettes, play your jukeboxes. We were 14, 15 years old, dying for more black music from America, and slowly you go through the rock’n’rollers and realise that these cats all learned from Muddy Waters. Even now, if I’m stuck for an idea I’ll go back to the blues because the musical form is limited and that makes it all the more intriguing. You’re telling me you can get more out of this thing? Ringing Hollow is our way of saying: we love you.
In a separate interview with the Sunday Times (via AXS), Richards called the song “a nostalgic love affair with America,” which is “a bit of a disappointment at the moment.” In the States today, “All you hear is the moaning about the price of gas,” Richards said. “This is where it hurts people.”
Watch a clip of the “Ringing Hollow” debut below.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
