'Back In Your Life' runs six minutes and thirteen seconds, the deepest hollow on 'Foreign Tongues': the spot where the record slows to catch its breath before sprinting for the exit. Read as a map, The Rolling Stones' twenty-fifth studio album is a plateau of four-to-five-minute cuts with two landmarks that give it relief: that long ballad at track thirteen and 'Hit Me In The Head', a sharp 2:57 spike that breaks the pattern just past the halfway mark.
The emotional arc shows at the edges too. You enter through 'Rough And Twisted' — as gnarled as its title, and a lead single alongside 'In The Stars' — and you leave dancing to 'Beautiful Delilah', a rock and roll number written by Chuck Berry. In between, produced by Andrew Watt for Polydor and Capitol, new songs sit next to unreleased material from the 'Hackney Diamonds' era and recordings from the band's final 2021 session with Charlie Watts, who plays drums on one track. That collision of timelines is why the album sounds like grief and celebration at once.
From Chuck Berry to Amy Winehouse
The other key to the landscape is the borrowed voices. 'You Know I'm No Good' (4:54) credits Amy Winehouse as its writer, and the guest list works like a set of coordinates:
- 'Never Wanna Lose You' (4:31): Bruno Mars on cowbell, quite possibly the year's least likely credit.
- 'Covered In You' (4:32): Paul McCartney on bass in one of the calmer pieces of the closing stretch.
- 'Beautiful Delilah' (3:29): Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers reinforcing the bass drum on the closer.
Add Steve Winwood on keys and The Cure's Robert Smith on guitar and synthesizer — hence the electronic glints between the riffs — and you get an hour-plus of well-drawn terrain: firm plateaus, one ravine, one jagged peak, and an exit that, with Chuck Berry getting the last word, sounds less like an epilogue than a starting point.
Sources: Wikipedia
