Mick Jagger Knows He May Have Played His Last Rolling Stones Show
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/magazine/mick-jagger-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xVA.JkRi.DfFglqoaS-Ip&smid=url-share
By David Marchese
July 11, 2026
Perhaps youâve heard of this weekâs interview subject. His name is Mick Jagger, and heâs the frontman for a rock ânâ roll combo that has been kicking around for a while called the Rolling Stones. The bandâs 25th studio album, âForeign Tongues,â was released on July 10.
OK, enough of that. The truth is Iâm an enormous Stones fan. Iâve studied each of those 25 albums (1986âs âDirty Workâ? Underrated!), and all the live ones (âBrussels Affairâ is secretly the best), and can honestly say Iâve heard all 400-plus songs the band has officially released â and plenty it hasnât. (At the risk of getting in trouble, Iâll point you to the great âBlood Red Wine.â) Iâve also seen Mick, Keith, Ronnie and the gang â R.I.P. Charlie Watts â in concert a half-dozen or so times. In fact, theirs was the first rock show I ever went to, when they played Toronto on the Voodoo Lounge Tour in 1994. But despite my abiding fandom, one element of the band always remained a mystery to me: What is Mick Jagger really like?
Now, I wonât pretend that the way people behave in interviews is some perfectly pure reflection of their authentic selves, but from reading older pieces about him, my impression of Mick, who is 82, was that he was politely aloof and basically tight-lipped. The person I spoke to at a Manhattan hotel on a drizzly day in May, though, was much chattier and warmer â and more playful â than I expected.
I have a bunch of questions about the new album, but Iâd like to start with a question that comes from pure personal curiosity: One of my all-time favorite songs of yours is âSwayâ from âSticky Fingers,â and Iâve always wondered about the first line, which is âDid you ever wake up to findâ ââ âA day that broke up your mind, destroyed your notion of circular time?â
I have not done that. Have you? [Laughs] No, itâs a question.
Do you remember where that line came from? I just made it up at the spur of the moment. We were waiting for Keith to turn up to the session. He was late. Mick Taylor and I were there, and Charlie and Bill [Wyman], and I said, âOh, let me try this.â I was just making it up as I went along. Thatâs why itâs a bit random.
It makes sense that waiting for Keith Richards would destroy your notion of circular time. So, some of the songs on the new album are relationship songs of regret or insecurity. Itâs interesting to hear you singing those songs at your age. They land differently than if you were singing them at 42 or 32 years old. What are the ways that you can inhabit a song now that are different from how you used to? Well, first of all, I donât think about it very much. Songwriting is about imagination. Itâs not all based on true experiences.
But youâve got to play the character of the song, right? But the character singing the song, itâs a different character from me. So when Iâm singing âMr. Charm,â it is obviously a joke character, and itâs supposed to be taken with a sense of humor. Some of the incidents in the verses did happen, and I can draw on my own experiences of talking to women in relationships. But the whole thing is not supposed to be taken seriously. You donât really think youâre Mr. Charm. But then you might have another song which is more heartfelt.
Like âBack in Your Life.â Which is a bit more of a classic theme: You meet a woman, and then she never calls you back.
Has that happened to you a lot? Of course itâs happened to me. Iâm not saying it happened yesterday.
I want to put the question in slightly different terms. Thereâs a movie performance of yours that I love, in âThe Man From Elysian Fields.â You play a middle-aged man who runs an escort service. That performance has a lot of regret in it, and I assume that you wouldnât have been able to give a performance like that earlier in your life. So, similarly, are there things that you can do in a song or did on the new album that make you think, Oh, I wasnât capable of inhabiting that lyric earlier? Thatâs a good question. It requires a lot of thought to give a good answer. I wouldnât have written any of these songs when I was 30, honestly. And Iâve also gotten into this habit of doing songs that are about personal relationships and then I throw a verse about politics in there. Thatâs a trick that Iâve learned from other songwriters, because nobody wants to hear a whole song about politics or social comment. A blues song like âRough and Twisted,â you talk about women and everything, but then you throw in stuff thatâs obviously political: âThe only club was called conspiracy.â âWhat they wanted was tyranny.â So you find yourself using these tricks.
Have you ever seen the John Mulaney special where he talks about working with you on âSaturday Night Liveâ? No, I never saw that.
He has this bit where people would ask him, Is Mick Jagger nice? And he says, Of course Mick Jaggerâs not nice, or heâs nice for the version of life that Mick Jagger has led. And he points out that when you play to stadiums of people screaming for you for 50-plus years, thatâs got to change you as a person. Can you articulate how thatâs changed you? Obviously, itâs not normal. It is not like most peopleâs lives. It does affect you. You can become disassociated.
From other people? From other people. A lot of people in show business only hang around with people in show business, because theyâve got something in common, they can relate to each other, and you get disassociated from what people might call âreal life.â
Have you? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, you do fight against it. Itâs a conscious effort.
How do you fight against it? Itâs quite easy, really. You go out and walk on the street on your own and do normal things, go and buy The New York Times. But, nevertheless, thatâs only temporary because psychologically your actual state of mind is permanently damaged. Your late 20s and early 30s is a very tough time for people in this business because itâs a big ego trip, and you have to have a huge ego to do this. People that do this that donât have huge egos have huge problems because they have to manufacture a completely different [personality]. I have a friend whose standing joke is that I behave at a dinner party like I behave onstage.
Is that friend right? Itâs absurd what you do onstage. Of course Iâm not really like my stage persona. Jimmy Fallon thinks heâs doing me, but itâs such an exaggerated version of me. This overbearing, shouting, ego-tripping person â youâre not really like that. But when youâre in your late 20s and early 30s, you can be like that all the time. And there are people in show business that never switch off. A lot of them are comedians, and sometimes they canât stop making jokes or they get depressed. Thatâs a bit of a sweeping statement.
Did you have to learn to switch off? Yeah, I think it comes with age. Youâve heard all these stories about method actors. They take it to the absolute extreme, so theyâre like the character all the time, and then after the movieâs over, theyâre still in character. It takes a long time to slough off the character. So which character do you go back to? Is he always going to carry some of that character in his âtrueâ character, whatever that is? This is the show business dichotomy and itâs something you learn to live with, and you always hope that youâre a so-called normal person underneath.
Itâs nice to have the perks, though! But itâs not about the perks. Itâs about being these several characters. Youâre the character that plays the theater, youâre the character who does the interview, youâre the character in the stadium, youâre the character in the recording studio, youâre the character writing the song.
Do you ever let the world see the person underneath the characters? Iâm not sure. Probably? Songs are pretty direct as a method of communication compared to a movie, where youâve got someone writing a script and itâs all edited, chopped up in bits. Records are relatively simple compared to that.
There are a handful of political lines sprinkled throughout the new record. You sing about scuttling billionaires âscrambling to their bolt-holes in the sky,â about dirty rat autocrats and rubber-stamping judges. I find it heartening to know that Mick Jagger sees the same problems as the rest of us. Can you tell me more about what youâre seeing when you look around the world? Itâs not the first time Iâve done songs with social comment. I like doing it, but in small doses. Itâs pop music, you know. âRinging Hollowâ is completely social comment. But even then, I had two songs that were on the same subject, which is my love of America.
And what has gone wrong. That song is a lament about the state of the country. Itâs a lament, but itâs a love song about my own experiences in America, which are long and varied and encompass lots of different places, not just New York and living on the Upper West Side. Iâve spent a lot of time in America in places that Americans have never ever been. I spend a lot of time in these weird places. On tour, you see everything. How many people from New York really go to Cleveland very often? And then youâre there for five days. Itâs not very long, but you can see quite a lot. New Orleans â I know people go to New Orleans and itâs a tourist place, but itâs a unique town in the United States, not like any other town. So you explore these places and you have a love of the country. I had another song, but the other song was too down and I rejected it and worked on âRinging Hollowâ instead. Itâs really a love song to Americans: I fell madly in love with you before we ever met, like a lot of European teenagers. So it was all about that, and then it goes into the America of now and how can we ascertain whatâs going on.
I want to ask about how you understand your relationship with your audience. First let me give two examples: On one pole, we have somebody like Bob Dylan. If you go see him live, it almost feels like the crowd is incidental. Heâs going to be doing whatever heâs doing, whether or not people show up. On the other end, you have somebody like Bruce Springsteen, who clearly sees his job as engaging in a meaningful back-and-forth with his audience. What does your relationship to the audience mean to you? What do all those people out there represent? It depends where you are and what kind of event it is. At the New Orleans Jazz Festival, they didnât come to see you. Glastonbury â you buy these tickets because you like that festival. So theyâre not your biggest fans, necessarily. Iâm not saying that they hate you, otherwise they probably wouldnât be there, but you have to treat them in a slightly different way. My job in the live music world is for those people that come to have the best time they possibly can and for two hours to forget all their problems and the problems of the world and their mortgages. I know youâre still on the phone like, âOh, little Danny hurt his tooth.â In the old days, you never had that, really. But my job is to make them have the best time possible. Theyâre going completely ape-[expletive]. Your job is to make them more ape-[expletive].
I want to dig a little deeper. Youâre talking about what your job is, but my question is about what meaning the job has. For example, I have a job that has a basic description, but when itâs working best, it allows me to satisfy curiosity I have about the world, ask questions of people that I would never get a chance to ask, and learn things that are valuable to me as a person. Whatâs Mick Jaggerâs version of that? Am I being naĂŻve to think that there is one? I have thought about this. At the beginning of my career, I didnât think about it at all. I was just learning how to do it. Whatâs the next number and is the band going to play it right? Am I going to remember the words? Just getting the basics down. But what youâre saying is, when I get out there, what does it all mean? Itâs a lot of joy for me. Itâs a huge adrenaline buzz, which must be the same as for a sport, except I donât have anyone coming at me. Your job is to control that adrenaline buzz, and while youâre doing that, youâre evaluating the audience. How are they feeling? Is it cold? Is it raining? Have they waited too long? Have they had a hard time getting in? A lot of them are a very long way away, because mostly I play stadiums. If youâre playing a theater, you donât have these problems. You can very quickly become a group. When I was starting out, people would show me how to do that. I toured for a long time with Little Richard. I had no idea that people could do what he did. Performers didnât do that. They just went out and played their songs and said hello, and that was it. He was embracing them all, getting them all to go along with his version of the world, stand up, sit down, make jokes. So for a small time, it becomes this community. Itâs much more difficult to do that in a stadium. You still have to do it. So thatâs why stages have to be big. Thatâs why you have to get down there and pay attention to all these people. You have to talk to them. I mean, Iâm not completely answering your question, but thatâs a lot of what I do.
You know, Iâve read a huge amount of interviews, and one thing that Iâve noticed is that you almost never tell stories about being in the Rolling Stones. Iâm not asking you to be nostalgic or share some intimate details, but thereâs got to be some old chestnut that you break out at cocktail parties or when your kids ask something like âWhat was it like being on tour with Stevie Wonder in 1972?â You mentioned Stevie Wonder. We were playing at Madison Square Garden with Stevie Wonder. We said come up and weâll play a mash-up of âSatisfactionâ and âUptight,â because theyâre both the same beat. And then someone â I canât remember whose idea this was, it might have been mine â decides that weâre going to throw custard pies at the end, because itâs the last number of the show of the last day of the tour. Itâs rather unfair for Stevie. So everyoneâs throwing custard pie, including Stevie, and everyone ends up covered in custard pies. I loved it.
So I was just watching clips of you on YouTube, and thereâs a great one of you at a keyboard trying to work through âShine a Light.â Youâre playing those gospel chords, and to paraphrase the song, thereâs a little gleam right in your eye, and it feels like the apparatus of fame and a crowd has fallen away and itâs just a musician playing music and loving it. Itâs very pure and sweet. Can you share a moment or a memory of when you were playing music and the machinery around the Rolling Stones fell away and you felt that love and freedom in playing a tune? What youâre describing really is when youâre writing. Youâre not thinking about going onstage or anything. Thatâs how songs get made, when youâre not thinking about anything else. While your mind is free and youâre having fun with it, thatâs the most interesting part of the process â and having fun is not like drinking and shouting and jumping up and down, but your mind is not really being serious. Itâs playful. âPlayfulâ is a better word than âfun.â You can let your mind go this way, that way, and donât be worried if nothing happens. Something will happen.
I was watching the video for the new song âIn the Stars,â which uses de-aging technology on the band. I thought de-aging was an interesting choice because one of the life-affirming things about the Rolling Stones is that youâve been defiant in terms of what aging means. Youâre still out there doing it. An opposite view is that you guys all have Peter Pan complexes or something. But I want to know what you find interesting or hard to reckon with in terms of aging. Whatâs good about getting older, physically or metaphysically? Thereâs nothing good about it.
Nothing? Wisdom? I forgot all my wisdom. I might have had a couple of pearls drop, but Iâve already forgotten what they are. [Laughs] So no, itâs not particularly pleasant. You canât do things as quickly as you want to. Physically youâve got to be more careful. You know, when youâre playing football, they put you in goal a lot. Iâm not very good at it!
Thatâs a metaphor for aging. Yeah, you get put in goal!
I have another philosophical question. This one is about sex. Youâve publicly been identified with sex for a long time. You write songs that are heavily sexual. Youâre an avatar of sexiness. You have a reputation as a libertine. How has your thinking about sex changed over time? Because it changes for everyone, so how has it changed for you? Itâs a very good question. People always say that when theyâre thinking, What the [expletive] am I going to say? If we sat down and we werenât recording this and we werenât doing an interview, we could talk. Youâd tell me how it worked for you. We could compare experiences.
Could we? Yeah, probably, because thatâs how you get insights. The only thing I will say is that throughout your life, your attitude to sex changes and your sexual tastes change. Sex is not a fixed point. Obviously, everybodyâs different. This is not my area of expertise. Weâre into areas of human psychology, sexual drive, pop psychology, but my observation is that your attitudes to sex are different in different parts of your life. Your sexual orientation may change. It may change completely, or avenues might open up to you that you hadnât realized, or you might close avenues that have opened up because you donât like them. Itâs like other tastes, like taste in art. When youâre very young, you might like these kinds of pictures. Then when youâre a bit older, you might change your taste. But why has your taste changed? Is it because of knowledge? Is it because youâre bored with it? Or is it a combination of all these things? Itâs like when weâre teenagers â we like rock music, but other, more snobbish people say: âYou should listen to jazz. Itâs more intellectual.â But do I really like that, or do I like Chuck Berry? You know what I mean? I used to go and see the Modern Jazz Quartet in concert. Everyoneâs sitting down, very seriously listening to it. No one was standing up.
I asked you about sex and we ended up at the Modern Jazz Quartet. [Laughs] How did I get out of that question?
I want to know about how you see your musical evolution. I think itâs fair to say that the magical period between 1968 and 1972 is when expectations for what a Rolling Stones album sounds like got solidified. When people say the new album sounds like a Stones album, they mean it has the signifiers of the classic Stones album. I know thereâs been experimenting over the years, but I think itâs true that there is a Rolling Stones sound. I can argue against that in a way, if I want to.
What argument would you make? Iâm going to tell you, Mick Jagger, that youâre wrong. I mean, if weâre talking about musicality, then youâre absolutely right. But I could point to lots of other things. Iâm not a huge student of the Rolling Stones oeuvre. Havenât got it all at my fingertip. But I could point to songs like âLady Jane,â âAs Tears Go By,â âAngie.â I could point to âPaint It Black.â Even âUnder My Thumb,â which someone played to me the other day. Vocally itâs very me, but instrumentally the way itâs played is so light. So there are other versions of the band. And thatâs what I think makes the band interesting.
With the exception of âAngie,â those songs all came before that period I suggested. But even after that period I can point out other ones. Itâs just that I donât remember them as well. Thereâs lots of others. âWaiting on a Friendâ is a kind of rumba, and very light with an alto saxophone lead. It is not really what you would expect.
But are there styles of music that you wanted to do or dream projects that you had that, because of audience expectations or what you thought the band would be interested in, you didnât pursue? Yeah, but you can pursue them. You donât do a whole album of them. I like samba music, so I did âSympathy for the Devil.â I listen to samba all the time, but no oneâs interested in me doing a samba record. I love Latin music of all kinds. Thereâs so many different rhythms and, yeah, I would like to pursue that and maybe I could have or should have because Iâm really interested in those rhythms. If youâre in a rock band, you touch on them, but you donât get to fully explore them.
Youâve given your creative life to rock music. But in 2026, the biggest rock concert draws are Gen X bands and baby boomer bands. Iâve seen data that suggests that catalog music, older music, has more streaming market share than younger music, and that things are continuing to trend that way. If you think about the buzziest younger rock band of today, which is a band like Geese, even that feels culturally marginal. What do you mean âculturally marginalâ?
Not in the center of the culture. Everyone was talking about this band, and when I played them, I thought it was going to be more like an indie band, but it was much more experimental, which I thought was great. Itâs very hard for a band as experimental as that to be in the center of mainstream music. Maybe in 1970, but now, I wouldnât have thought so.
But do you have thoughts about the vitality of rock music as a whole, or its place in the culture now, given that the most popular exponents tend to be older artists? Despite the fact that rock music as a genre is not really the mainstream center of music, it still has a lot of supporters, lots of young teenage people that want to play it, and you hope that it evolves. Rap was the center of our music 20 years ago, and now rap is not the force it once was, but everyone incorporates it into everything. Itâs one of the strands of popular music. All these strands in popular music, itâs really rather artificial a lot of times. When you have to market things, you want to tell people what they are: This is mint-flavored, Iâm selling mint-flavored products. Itâs a bit like that in music so that people know what theyâre getting, so you donât scare them. Weâve cut up all our genres in little slices, but the reality is that most musicians appreciate all kinds of music. What Iâm saying is that a lot of music has a lot of history, and intelligent people shouldnât be slicing it into little bits and saying, âI only like this bit.â It doesnât mean anything. Whatâs folk music? All these invented things.
Right, theyâre arbitrary distinctions. They are.
I saw a quote from Keith Richards the other day saying that the band is probably not going to be able to do long tours anymore, but there are hopes to do residencies. You must have some doubt about whether or not the Rolling Stones will ever go on a big tour again. I have doubts about it when I hear that! I donât mind touring at all. If you canât go anywhere, then you have to do residencies.
But do you think the Stones will do another world-spanning tour? I hope so. Iâm up for doing it.
Will you know when youâve walked offstage with the Rolling Stones for the last time? No. Maybe I have! I could get run over by a bus outside of my house. You never really know, do you? You donât know whatâs going to happen to you in life. But I personally hope to be able to tour. I like going places. I like meeting people. I like to go to weird countries to do shows. I did a show in Indonesia once on my own, which was so crazy. It was so hot. It was unbelievable. I was out there and it was daytime, there werenât any lights, and I thought, What am I going to wear?
Can I ask you a completely tangential question? I could not find any record of you commenting on singing backing vocals on Carly Simonâs âYouâre So Vain.â When did you realize that some people thought the song was about you? Why would it be about me when Iâm singing on it? It doesnât make sense, but people think thatâs what it was. That was a big thing, because she would never reveal who it was about.
And then she did. I never thought to ask â it was just a song! Iâm just the backing vocalist. I knew the producer, Richard Perry, who phoned me up and said, Can you do the backing vocals? I thought it was a great song. It was a big hit for her and I was never credited with a feature. These days, it would be âCarly Simon featuring Mick Jagger.â Iâm louder than her on some of it.
Well, thank you for clearing that up. Weâve now added to the sum total of Rolling Stones history. While weâre talking about clearing things up: The recordâs been reviewed, and Iâve gotten lots of nice reviews. Iâm really appreciative.
But somethingâs nagging at you? Itâs not nagging, but people hear one word and they donât really listen to the line. So itâs like, Mick Jagger has a go at Elon Musk. Well, youâre not listening to the line. Youâre only listening to âMusk.â Musk â he must be having a go at him. I mean, I do call him âmad.â
And heâs the one person you name on the whole album. Yeah, the funny thing is when I wrote that, I was thinking that because of him, they were able to get those astronauts that were stuck back, because he provided the transportation. So that line of the song is about when I was a kid, we used to want to go to Mars, and then I said, Who would you trust to get you into space? Would you trust Boeing or was it NASA or was it mad mogul Mr. Musk? So itâs really a sidewinding compliment, because he was the one that was able to do that when the others couldnât.
Well, thatâs what you get for using the adjective âmad.â And âmogul.â âMogulâ doesnât always go down well either.
My favorite Rolling Stones song, which I think is also the best Rolling Stones song, is âYou Canât Always Get What You Want.â Itâs a simple sentiment, but thereâs something profound in the chorus, which is âYou canât always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.â Whatâs the last thing that you really tried to get, that you wanted to get, that you couldnât? Oh, my god! A song analysis that leads to a personal wish? I canât recall one that stands out, honestly.
Thatâs a good life, my friend! Iâm sorry, obviously everyone has frustrations. I was very frustrated professionally for years that the Rolling Stones never made any new music. That was a huge frustration for me, and I solved it.
Thereâs another old clip I saw of you from a press conference. Really old one, because we havenât had press conferences for hundreds of years.
I think itâs connected to a Madison Square Garden concert in the â60s. Someone asks you a question like, How do you think about being in the Rolling Stones? And you describe the Rolling Stones as âfinancially dissatisfied, sexually satisfied, philosophically trying.â Thatâs just a pat answer to a news conference in New York where people used to throw you really dumb questions.
So donât give me the pat answer. Where do you stand with those things? My interest in philosophy is superficial. I find it a really hard subject. I need a teacher. I canât just do it from reading. When I was in college, I did some philosophy courses. Thatâs hundreds of years ago. In âJealous Lover,â thereâs a Plato reference.
Shadows on the wall? Yes, you got it! Well done. But I find it a hard subject to educate myself into. Iâve recently read a couple of books, and Iâm really finding it hard. Theyâre always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing with their masters. I was reading this book on Kant. Theyâre quite rude to each other and then they have to make up later, and I canât understand what theyâre really talking about. Was Kant a Christian? Was he an atheist?
I think itâs cool that youâre reading Kant. Well, itâs all vaguely fashionable.
So philosophically, youâre still trying? Iâm sticking with that. Iâm sticking with that 1965 quote.
Mick, itâs been a gas, gas, gas. Oh, no, David! Thatâs awful! [Laughs] Thank you so much.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow âThe Interviewâ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Director of photography (video): Tre Cassetta
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
