At 82, Keith Richards Isn’t Done Yet: ‘If It’s a Matter of Energy, We’ve Got It’

Keith Richards doesn’t seek out old Rolling Stones records—unless he draws a blank trying to remember one of his many iconic riffs. “I’m saying, ‘How the hell did that song go? I better bone up.’ ”

But eluding the music of rock royalty is no easy task. Richards has four adult children, and they’ll “play my stuff,” he acknowledges. “Sometimes I hear it on the radio, and it comes out of nowhere.”

In these moments, the guitarist is poleaxed like the rest of us. “It hits me,” he says with a devilish grin. “Oh man, that’s good.”

Splayed in an armchair in a Midtown Manhattan hotel with views of a fog-shrouded Rockefeller Center, Richards still radiates roguish, live-wire energy at 82. He fidgets with a pair of eyeglasses and points a knobby index finger to underscore a point, jiggles his leg restlessly and, at one point, mimes playing guitar.

Wizened and creased, with a hoop the size of a quarter dangling in his left ear, he relies on gestures—shrugs, grimaces, guffaws—to flesh out responses that lean terse. He’s discussing the latest Rolling Stones album, “Foreign Tongues,” due July 10, which has brought the band together in New York. Mick Jagger is nearby, ambling through the hotel hallway.

The Rolling Stones released its first new collection of original songs in 18 years with 2023’s “Hackney Diamonds”; now the group is putting out a second less than three years later—a rate of productivity unmatched since the 1980s. “Their fans were reacting to the new music, and they got a bit of momentum,” says Andrew Watt, who produced the previous album as well as “Foreign Tongues.”

Richards offers an alternate explanation for the burst of studio activity: “Andrew’s a little ball of fire, full of energy; he doesn’t mind kicking ass, and doesn’t mind whose [ass] it is.”

With Richards’s gnarled, withering guitar lines and Jagger drawling and declaiming, there’s no mistaking the band behind “Foreign Tongues.” The album was preceded in May by “Rough and Twisted,” a wandering blues number with riffs like barbed wire, and “In the Stars,” which softens arena rock with polished backing vocals.

Logan Peterson, a 25-year-old fan, calls the two songs “head and shoulders above what they put out on ‘Hackney Diamonds.’ ”

“It felt like they warmed up from the previous project,” he adds. “It felt almost like some old-school Stones.”

“AFTER YEARS OF TOILING IN OBSCURITY, this is their time,” Conan O’Brien joked as he introduced the band to preview a few new songs for an admiring crowd in Brooklyn in May.

When O’Brien lobbed questions at Richards, many of the guitarist’s answers were undiscernible; he seemed uninterested in keeping his microphone in the vicinity of his mouth. “I’m still trying to work my way back in,” Richards says, recounting the appearance the next day. “Can’t say I didn’t have long training.”

When the Rolling Stones first arrived in the U.S. from England, “it was another world,” Richards recalls with wonder in his weathered voice. “We made it to America. You dreamt about that.”

The group’s primal musical stew came from thoroughly American ingredients: ragged blues, chugging rock, narcotic country and hoarse soul. Richards sometimes spent days without leaving the studio, a wily guitar wonk dreaming up rugged riffs. Some two dozen of these still have a visceral, immediate impact on a wide swath of the population, and the band released a series of fearsome albums between “Beggars Banquet” in 1968 and “Tattoo You” in 1981.

Most artists “never come even close to striking greatness in the way that the Stones did once,” Peterson says. “And they did it four or five times.”

In Brooklyn, O’Brien marveled that Jagger still sounds much like he did in 1968. “I was taking a lot more drugs in 1968,” the singer replied, without offering any secrets for vocal longevity other than practice.

“You never believe what Mick says,” Richards laughs the next day.

That said, “the fact is that he does [sound the same],” the guitarist adds. “If he didn’t, I’d fire him.” Chuckle chuckle.

“Bless his heart, he is full of beans,” he continues, describing Jagger this way twice in 30 minutes, “and playing some really great blues harp on this record.”

Over the years, the relationship between Richards and Jagger has waxed and waned. One pole of warmth might be the pair recording “Wild Horses,” which came out on “Sticky Fingers,” a seedy jewel of an album from 1971: “They both stood at the microphone together with the fifth of bourbon, passing it back and forth, and sang the lead and harmony into one microphone,” the pianist Jim Dickinson remembered in Richards’s autobiography “Life.”

At the other end of the spectrum, while recording the 1983 album “Undercover,” “bickering and sniping” and barely able to tolerate each other, Jagger took the afternoon shift and Richards would work in the middle of the night so they didn’t cross paths. The chapter of “Life” dedicated to this period opens with the line, “It was the beginning of the 80s when Mick started to become unbearable.”

Some friction is productive—“One guy goes to the left and the other guy goes to the right, and that’s how you get the songs that you love,” Watt explains—but too much becomes a problem if the goal is to finish an album.

While producing “Foreign Tongues,” he served as both a buffer and a translator. “My job was to take something that Mick thought Keith may not like and bring it to Keith if I liked it. And then maybe he did like it and would say, ‘I think it could be even better if you do this.’”

It wasn’t always sunshine and roses. “Often they don’t appropriately or correctly guess how the other one’s going to feel about what they may be presenting,” Watt says. “You get your f—ing head chopped off sometimes. But then you screw it back on, and you get up, and you go for another round.”

Today, Richards praises Watt for getting “the hang of working between Mick and me.”

THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT FACTIONS of Rolling Stones fans, each with their own idea about when the band was at its peak—and when the band fell off. “‘I don’t like the production on the new Stones record’ is something people have been saying for 50 years,” says Christian Bonner, co-host of “Under the Radar: A Rolling Stones Podcast.”

But even as the fans fire off hot takes, they keep flocking to the group’s shows. The Rolling Stones remain stadium-filling stalwarts, with more $100 million-grossing tours than anyone in history.

At this point, the band’s concerts elicit “a twinge of awe that they’re able to do this at their age,” explains Justin Sosa, who has seen 25 shows and hosts his own Rolling Stones podcast called Hang Fire. “You walk away impressed, proud, pleased. Even if that mushy emotional stuff is probably the last thing Mick wants to hear, you can’t help but feel like, ‘Damn it, look at these guys, they’re still doing it.’”

In 2024, Bonner and his co-host, Tim Lindsay, drove from Toronto to New Jersey to see their favorite band perform after the release of “Hackney Diamonds.”

“Both the shows were really great,” Lindsay recalls. “We were pretty close to the action, and it sounded amazing. We’re ready to see them anytime, anywhere.”

The band has not announced any shows in 2026, though, and nervous speculation has flared online: Maybe this is it, and the group won’t tour again. In recent years, Richards has suffered from arthritis in his hands.

Possibly because the man once punctured a lung falling off a ladder in his home library and later fractured his skull tumbling out of a tree in Fiji, he brushes off arthritis as if it were a pesky mosquito. “It’s not painful; it’s benign,” Richards says. “It’s just that I needed more space. So I made a few guitars that widened the headboard” to give his fingers additional room to work.

He ruled out hitting the road this year. “But I don’t see any reason we’ll not [tour] next year,” Richards says. “Mind you, I could be wrong.” He has floated the idea of trying a residency instead of a multicity extravaganza.

“If it’s just a matter of energy, yeah we’ve got it,” he adds. “It’s conserve and then open up the valves again. Learn how to hold yourself in reserve a little bit and play around with energy—rather than just smash into it.”

Write to Elias Leight at elias.leight@wsj.com