The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues Includes an Amy Winehouse Cover and a Ronnie Wood Spotlight

The most striking detail from the Rolling Stones’ upcoming 25th studio album lands in a place you might not expect: a cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good.” Foreign Tongues, due July 10, arrives as a 14-track record built around Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, but studded with high-profile guests including Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood and Robert Smith.

Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones perform on stage during the No Filter Tour at SoFi Stadium on Oct. 14, 2021, in Inglewood, Calif.
Christopher Polk/Variety

Wood, 78, used a May 7 appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show to tease the record and to remind viewers that his life beyond the band remains busy. He’ll embark on a run of solo shows across the U.K. and continental Europe this summer — his first solo run in 16 years — and will stage an exhibition of his paintings in Germany this November.

On late night, Fallon read from a vinyl copy of Foreign Tongues and highlighted the Winehouse cover, a choice that echoes a small but memorable slice of shared history: Winehouse guested with the Stones at the Isle of Wight Festival in June 2007 for “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” The Tonight Show segment also included a clip of “Back In Your Life,” which Fallon praised for featuring a “fantastic” Ronnie Wood solo.

Wood offered some of the record’s quieter mythology about how that solo arrived. He says he cut his take in one pass on the same day Brian Wilson died last June, still shaken by Sly Stone’s death days earlier. “It came out my guitar, the feeling, you know,” Wood told Fallon. “Just one take. I didn’t do that, the guitar played itself.”

His Tonight Show stop doubled as a reminder of the two things Wood treats as complementary disciplines: painting and music. He traced his earliest lessons to older siblings, recalled being penniless before the fame, the loose histories around forming the Faces with Rod Stewart and others, and closed the interview with a harmonica jam alongside Fallon and the house band. “It’s inspirational to do music and art,” he said. “I’m lucky enough to do a solo thing with the painting, and then be a part of a band, you know, part of a group, to express musically. It’s such a gift, you know, to be able to do both.”

The Stones have already released two tracks from Foreign Tongues: opening cut “Rough and Twisted” and lead single “In the Stars.” Wood’s appearance on NBC followed Mick Jagger’s own late-night visit by just 24 hours, when Jagger took part in a comedy sketch.

The inclusion of an Amy Winehouse song on a record by a band at this stage of their career reads as more than a cover choice. It gestures toward the Stones’ ongoing practice of nodding to peers and younger figures who reshaped popular music while reminding audiences that these sessions still function as a kind of musical commune. Foreign Tongues bets on collaboration, memory and, in Wood’s phrasing about that single-take solo, the persistence of instinct even after decades on the road.