Keith Richards completes solo album

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/09/keith-richards-completes-solo-album

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Keith Richards has completed a new solo album, his first in 22 years. Made over the course of “a couple of years”, the LP will be released once the Rolling Stones’ current tour winds down – probably next June.

“I have a solo record finished, but I don’t want to put it out while the Stones are working,” Richards told the Associated Press. “[We’ve] got South America lined up in February, Buenos Aires, Peru. And after that, I know what the Stones tours are like, they tend to get extended.”

Richards has been working with Steve Jordan, his longtime partner in the X-Pensive Winos. “We had no rush,” he explained. “Every month or two we’d come down here,” to New York’s Germano Studios, “and do a couple a day and knock off a couple of tracks … Nearly every record I’ve made is … ‘You’ve got another five days,’ but this one we’re taking our time.”

Richards briefly discussed this record in 2011, saying that after a two-decade break, the music was finally “starting to blossom”. A year and a half later, the Stones resumed their grind: touring from late 2012 to mid-2013, then staging another string of dates in 2014. The band could “potentially tour for most of 2015”, Richards admitted. 

Besides two new Stones songs, released in 2012, Richards’ most recent recording project to see the light of day was Wingless Angels II, a set of Rastafarian spirituals HE made with Justin Hinds in he early 2000s. The guitarist also put out a bestselling memoir, Life, and is about to publish a children’s book inspired by his grandfather, Gus. Richards’ most recent solo album, 1992’s Main Offender, peaked at No 45 on the UK chart and barely scratched the US top 100.