Hot off their best rock album Grammy win in 2025 for Hackney Diamonds, The Rolling Stones come roaring back this month with a new (and even better) album, Foreign Tongues. For the latest Billboard cover story, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sat down with me (separately – Mick in London, Keith in New York) to talk about famous guests on the album, their songwriting processes and if technology has changed their studio dynamic.
Since debuting 63 years ago, the Stones have recorded through numerous technological evolutions. “[When] we started off, it was two-track [tape],” Richards told Billboard inside the Roxy Hotel’s Django Room. “That was crème de la crème. Within a year it was four. You always had these technological leaps – before you knew it, the 16-track. There was always something new on the plate to play around with. And you’d say, ‘Not another push button.’”
The latest “push button” that tech innovators are throwing at music creators is artificial intelligence, which has provoked heated debate about human agency in art and what legal protections creators should have against those who would train AI to imitate them without compensation.
“Obviously I don’t want to be imitated by AI, vocally and instrumentally, and the band doesn’t,” Jagger stated definitely while speaking to Billboard in London. “I don’t want people just putting stuff out there that can sound exactly like The Rolling Stones — I think that’s obviously wrong. If someone wants to make music by AI, go ahead. But it has to be original — you have to have your own input and your own thoughts. There are people who use AI to just make a song from scratch, in the style of The Rolling Stones. If you were any kind of creative person, you wouldn’t do that.”
The Glimmer Twins might not agree on everything, but their thoughts on AI dovetail. “I’d rather hear something original,” Richards stated. “Music could do a lot better than just trying to copy itself. After all, it’s pretty simple stuff — this is not Beethoven or Bach, and I’ve no doubt AI can do that, but so what? We want new input. We don’t want more and more copying and synthesizing. At least that’s my point of view. Music is to play around with. Surely there’s enough originality without having to copy nursery rhymes.”
The Stones did, however, rely at least partially on AI to create the music video for “In the Stars,” one of the Foreign Tongues tracks. While the Odessa A’zion-starring clip was filmed with real actors/musicians in vintage clothes on a real set, deepfake technology was used to superimpose the faces of Jagger, Richards and Ronnie Wood over the actors who resembled them. The final product makes it look like the Stones of yesteryear are performing a Rolling Stones song from 2026.
“We had a lot of fun with that,” Jagger said. “It’s only the faces of the musicians that are different. They’re not fake people in a fake room; they’re all in a room, really playing together. The musicians are real musicians that look a bit like The Rolling Stones in 1968. The only thing was the faces. So they worked on mine first, and it kind of looked like me, but not really — like one of my children when they were 23 or something. And then I saw Ronnie, and I said to the people working on it, ‘It looks more like Jeff Beck,’” he continued, referencing the British guitar god Wood used to play with as part of the Jeff Beck Group in the late ‘60s. “So they had to do a bit extra work.”
“That’s our brushing with AI,” Richards mused. “I said, ‘Very nice. I wish I looked like that now.’ But maybe that’s what they’re good for — music videos. Put it in its proper place. It’s a cartoon of me, younger. ‘Very nice. What’s for breakfast?’”
For Richards, even the concept of a music video is a bit suspect.
“The idea of video and music together — I knew it was a disaster way back in the ’70s,” he told me. “You can’t shove the ears and the eyes together and say, ‘Here it is, look at this.’ But that’s the commercial end of the business, and you duck and dive. The video became, for a while, more important than the record — which is where it really screwed it up for me as a viable thing. It was just, ‘Have you seen the new video?’ ‘No — I just made a record.’ But that’s just me being ornery, probably.”
You can read the Rolling Stones’ full Billboard cover story here.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com ’
