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The Rolling Stones Kick Off the Foreign Tongues Era in Brooklyn With Conan O’Brien
At a domed 1875 bank in Williamsburg, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood sat with Conan O’Brien to launch Foreign Tongues. Stories about Robert Smith’s lipstick, Paul McCartney ticking a career box and Andrew Watt’s front-row cameo made the night feel casual, intimate and stubbornly human.
The Weylin has a dome, a bank vault and the kind of low, honeyed acoustics that make you feel like you’re eavesdropping on history. On a humid Brooklyn night in June, that former Williamsburg bank built in 1875 felt less like a promo stop and more like a living room conversation between three survivors and the crowd that still wants to argue with them.
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood walked through the venue’s vintage vault door to join Conan O’Brien for a loose, often funny hour about Foreign Tongues, the Rolling Stones’ 14-track LP due July 10 on Capitol. The album’s roll call reads like a cross-generational guest list: Paul McCartney, Robert Smith of The Cure, Steve Winwood, Chad Smith, plus familiar Stones confidants Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford and Steve Jordan. Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, is present on the record via one of his final sessions — a reminder that the band’s present is stitched to its past.
Conan introduced the night with a line that felt more sincere than comedic: “This is the gig of a lifetime.” He also admitted he’d listened to Foreign Tongues 25 times. Jagger, half-amused, half-deflective, shrugged off a compliment about his vocal sound being similar to 1968: “Well, I was taking a lot of drugs in ’68.” O’Brien’s follow-up, “This is an invention, by the way,” produced a weary Jagger moan that undercut the flatteringly earnest observation.
Richards, mostly cooperative but never entirely domesticated, provided the evening’s most human moments. He forgot to use his mic; Conan reached between the chairs and held it up to Keef’s lips. “That’s the Irish in you!” Richards joked, then grumbled about the room’s echo and pointed at producer Andrew Watt, who was sitting in the front row. Watt, who also produced 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, got a ribbing for the acoustics: “If I ever do a gig with you again, I’m gluing [the microphone] to your face,” O’Brien told him. The exchange felt like a small, affectionate roast between traveling companions.
The talk moved quickly from one-off anecdotes to the mechanics of collaboration. Jagger described Robert Smith’s appearance the way you tell a story about running into an old friend: he turned up for vocals in London, saw “this bloke standing there with his back to me with a long gown on,” then the man turned and was “covered in lipstick.” “We’d never met before and I said, ‘You are Robert Smith of The Cure!’ And he said, ‘Yeah!'” A few minutes later Smith was on a track. The casualness of it made the collaboration feel inevitable, not calculated.
Ronnie Wood gave the McCartney story a similar, bemused simplicity: Paul wanted a box ticked. “He says, ‘Now I can say I’ve played with the Rolling Stones. Wow!'” Wood laughed. It landed as both a compliment and a shrug — the Stones still operate with the small, private pleasures of veteran players who have run out of things to prove in public.
That low-key approach extends to how the Stones have rolled out Foreign Tongues. They teased the record in mid-April by releasing “Rough and Twisted” on vinyl only under the pseudonym The Cockroaches, then put the melodic lead single “In the Stars” on streaming services on May 5. Those moves feel deliberately patchy, the kind of eccentric timeline a band with a 60-year career can afford: scarcity for the collectors, stream access for everyone else.
What the Brooklyn event crystallized, though, is a strategic tension that has shadowed the Stones since at least Hackney Diamonds: how to stay reverent to a legacy while still inviting contemporary voices into the room. Andrew Watt’s name keeps recurring as a facilitator; his presence ties the two records together, and suggests the Stones are actively choosing modern producers who understand how to stitch veteran swagger into present-day frameworks.
Whether Foreign Tongues will be followed by another stadium run remains unanswered. The band’s last campaign behind Hackney Diamonds yielded an 18-date, summer 2024 tour that grossed roughly $235 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. That string of shows followed a launch in New York — the Stones played The Racket in Manhattan in October 2023 with Lady Gaga as a guest — and feels like precedent against which any new tour plan will be judged.
For now the Brooklyn evening read less like a launch than a small, knowing celebration: older men joking about microphones, laughing at their own anecdotes, and reminding an audience that the Rolling Stones still enjoy the act of making records as much as they do selling tickets. There was vanity and nostalgia in equal measure, but also a sense that collaborations on Foreign Tongues arrived because the band left room for them to happen — not because someone ran the numbers in a boardroom.
Ultimately, this was a night about touchpoints. Manhattan lyrics from “Shattered” floated in the air as background context; a domed 19th-century bank became the setting for an almost private unveiling; and a Beatles cameo landed as an afterthought to a decades-long conversation among peers. The Stones, for all their stadium size and headline-grabbing gross, still choose the odd, intimate stage when the mood suits them. That matters. It keeps the mythology messy and human, rather than perfectly polished and corporate.
