Keith Richards - Crosseyed Heart, album review: 'exquisitely judged'

Rolling Stones legend sounds totally at ease with himself on third solo album
Surprising depth: Keith Richards shows off a more emotional side on his latest solo album
Michael Hickey/Getty Images
John Aizlewood18 September 2015

He’s kept busy by his day job, so Keith Richards’s solo career has necessarily been so sporadic that Crosseyed Heart is just the third album under his own name.

Keith Richards - Crosseyed Heart

Comfortingly, it finds the guitar hero at his most languid and least Stones-like.

He shuffles like JJ Cale; he growls like Leonard Cohen, and whether knocking out a twangsome version of Gregory Isaacs’s reggae staple Love Overdue or his own Suspicious, he sounds wholly at ease with himself.

As ever, he loses the plot when he gets too sloppily pubby (Blues in the Morning is borderline unlistenable).

But for the most part Crosseyed Heart is exquisitely judged and there’s a surprising depth of emotion on Illusion, a delectable duet with Norah Jones, while Richards shows a hitherto undiscovered capacity to ache on Robbed Blind.

(Virgin/EMI)

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