ALBUM REVIEW
‘Crosseyed Heart’
Keith Richards
2.5 stars (out of 4)
The Rolling Stones are on a once-a-decade recording schedule (they just announced plans to make a new studio album next year, which would be their first since 2005). But Keith Richards has been stockpiling tunes, and his third solo studio album, “Crosseyed Heart” (Republic), provides a snapshot of a guitarist who knows how to stay out of the way of a song.
The impetus behind most contemporary production is to add, in part because it’s so easy to pile on with digital gear. Richards revels in taking things away. His recordings suggest a bare-bones demo more than a gleaming pop production, and the listener can practically feel the air moving in the room, the space between notes. For this approach to work, the songs have to be undeniable, and his latest batch doesn’t always measure up.
The guitarist’s wreck of a voice sounds unstrained and conversational, in the way the last several Bob Dylan albums have opted for intimacy instead of overload. He leads a small group of trusted friends, including drummer Steve Jordan, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, vocalists Sarah Dash and Bernard Fowler, keyboardists Ivan Neville and Spooner Oldham, and saxophonist Bobby Keys, a Stones insider playing on one of his final sessions before his death last year.
There are a couple of midtempo riff rockers (“Heartstopper,” “Trouble”) that could’ve easily fit on any middling Stones record of the last couple of decades, and there are obligatory nods to Richards’ love of blues, country and reggae. The acoustic “Crosseyed Lover” sounds as casual as a front-porch reverie, with the guitarist picking out a variation on a Robert Johnson acoustic blues, only to stop after a couple minutes as if he forgot the rest of it. “That’s all I got,” he rasps.
With sighing pedal steel, “Robbed Blind” delivers more Pirate Keef mischief: “The cops, I can’t involve them, God knows what they would find.” You can practically see his eyes rolling as he delivers the line, a reference to his long-running battles with authority figures in all kinds of uniforms.
“Amnesia” casts a similarly personal and slightly darker shadow. Richards used to downplay the brain surgery that followed his tumble from a coconut tree in 2006, but “Amnesia” puts a more ominous spin on how it clouded his life. “Nowhere . nowhere,” he rumbles over a loose, shambling groove.
Though often cast as the Stones’ resident outlaw, Richards also is the band’s heart-on-sleeve romantic. The guy who wrote “Angie,” “Wild Horses” and “Ruby Tuesday” sprinkles the album with ballads, though the only one that has a pulse is Gregory Isaacs’ reggae lament “Love Overdue.” The other slow ones wobble. Duet partner Norah Jones helps set “Illusion” adrift, and “Just a Gift” sounds as bored as the barfly narrator claims to be when he’s away from his one true love.
The album’s best moment is beamed in from one of Richards’ formative influences. His interpretation of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” makes it sound like an outtake from the Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” sessions: “If Irene ever turned me down, I’d take morphine and die.”
