In Praise of Mick Jagger’s Voice

A little more than a minute into “Angry”—the first song and first single from the first album of Rolling Stones originals in 18 years—Keith Richards summons a series of descending notes that sounds like an elusive, open-tuned riff he wrote at Villa Nellcote in 1971, one that turned an embryonic number called “Good Time Women” into “Tumbling Dice.” At the start of another new Stones song, “Driving Me Too Hard,” that little lick recurs. Are these intentional references? Or unconscious callbacks, the products of a recording career so extended that snatches of some songs are bound to sound like snatches of others? To finish an album plagued by previous false starts, the Stones worked at a pace that discouraged such questions. “Is this song like another one I’ve done? You can figure that out later,” Mick Jagger told The New York Times about the band’s approach in the studio. “Let’s keep moving.”