Get Close

You are locked into The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock stream that still believes a song can take its time and a band can mean something. Park it at thezoorocks.com and stay with the deep cuts. This one is Get Close, track two on Hackney Diamonds, the Rolling Stones record that landed in October 2023 and reminded a lot of people why the greatest rock and roll band in the world still gets to use that line without blinking.

Get Close is not a nostalgia exercise and it is not a guest-star novelty. It is a lean, uptempo Stones groove with Mick Jagger out front, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood on guitars, Steve Jordan on the drums, and Elton John sitting in on piano like a session man who never stopped being one. Andrew Watt produced the album and co-wrote this track with Jagger and Richards. Watt also plays bass and sings in the background pile-up. Matt Clifford is on Wurlitzer. James King blows saxophone. Ron Blake handles trumpet. Karlos Edwards adds percussion, and Jagger himself is in on the percussion as well as the guitar. That is a full room, and it still sounds like the Stones.

The song came together in pieces. Keith and Watt sent Jagger a groove while he was in Italy. Mick liked the pocket and was not sure what to do with it. Once they were in Los Angeles the top-line melody arrived fast. Watt later said Mick is tempo-obsessed in the best way: things have to move, but not so fast that the vocal cannot sit in the pocket. Watt took a Polaroid while Steve Jordan laid down the beat and Mick tested the vocal, just to be sure there was room to sing. The sessions for Hackney Diamonds ran through Henson in Los Angeles, Metropolis in London, and Sanctuary Studios in the Bahamas, with the mix finished at MixStar in Virginia Beach. Get Close belongs to that stretch, roughly October 2022 into early 2023. For a long time after the album came out, the band had not taken it onstage. It lived as a studio record, which is a strange fate for a song this physical.

Elton John's piano is the detail people miss on the first pass and cannot unhear after that. He does not sing. He does not take a bow in the arrangement. He plays. Watt has said Elton started life as a session musician and still loves the job. Jagger was surprised he did not want a bigger role. Elton later told interviewers he was thrilled to be on the record at all, and that playing with the Stones had been on the bucket list. He is also on Live by the Sword, the Hackney Diamonds track that pairs him with original bassist Bill Wyman and with Charlie Watts, whose drums were already in the can. Get Close is the other Elton track, and the drum chair there belongs to Steve Jordan, the man Keith trusted to keep the engine running after Charlie's death in August 2021.

A short bio, because the band is older than most of the stations that still play them. The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962, named after a Muddy Waters song, built around Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman, with Ian Stewart on piano until the business side decided a sixth Stone was one too many. They took American blues and R&B, played it with English nerve, and by the middle of the decade had written their way out of being a cover band. Satisfaction, Paint It Black, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man, Gimme Shelter, Brown Sugar, Tumbling Dice, Angie, It's Only Rock 'n Roll, Miss You, Start Me Up. The catalog is a weather system. Jones was gone by 1969. Mick Taylor held the second guitar chair through Exile on Main St. Ronnie Wood arrived in 1975 and never really left. Wyman stepped away after the Steel Wheels era. Charlie Watts, the jazz drummer who made rock time feel like swing, died at 80 in 2021. Jagger, Richards, and Wood kept the name honest by refusing to pretend the chair was empty and by hiring the right drummer.

Hackney Diamonds is their first album of new original songs since A Bigger Bang in 2005. The title is East London slang for the broken glass left on the pavement after a window gets smashed. The band teased it with a fake glass-repair ad in the Hackney Gazette, established 1962, tongue logo tucked into the lettering, a phone line that told you not to get angry and to get it fixed. The record opens with Angry, then Get Close, then Depending on You. Paul McCartney plays bass on Bite My Head Off. Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder are on Sweet Sounds of Heaven. Charlie Watts is on Mess It Up and Live by the Sword, and Wyman returns on the latter. The album won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. It did not win because of the guest list. It won because the songs moved.

Get Close is the one that feels like a city walk with the past strapped on. Jagger bargains, dodges, and keeps coming back to the same plea: get close, get lost, pour the secrets out. The chorus is simple enough to sing in a car and sharp enough to cut. Richards' guitar does what Richards' guitar has done since the open-G years, which is to leave space and then fill it with something that sounds accidental and is not. Wood weaves. Jordan plays with Charlie's economy and his own snap. The horns do not turn it into a soul revue. They punctuate. That is the old Stones trick, learned from Chess Records and from the road: horns as punctuation, piano as muscle, vocal as the lead instrument.

Trivia worth keeping. Jagger, Richards, and Watt share the writing credit, which puts Watt in a small club. The album's launch was staged at the Hackney Empire in East London, the neighborhood that gave the record its name. Two of the twelve tracks carry Charlie Watts, which means the rest of the album, Get Close included, is the first full statement of the Jordan-era studio band. Elton John has said the session felt like a favor returned in both directions. Andrew Watt, who had already worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, and Eddie Vedder, was the prod who Mick said kicked them up the backside and got the record finished. The Stones have always needed an outside ear when the years get long. Jimmy Miller, Chris Kimsey, Don Was, and now Watt. The pattern holds.

If you want the long view, the official camp is at rollingstones.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/therollingstones, on Instagram at instagram.com/therollingstones, and on X at x.com/RollingStones. The fan club that has been filing set lists since 1980 is It's Only Rock 'n Roll at iorr.org. The session-by-session archive at timeisonourside.com is the other desk worth keeping open, including the page that logs who played what on Get Close.

Sixty-odd years in, the Stones are still arguing with the present tense. Get Close does not ask you to remember 1972. It asks you to lean in. That is the job. The Zoo will keep spinning the records that still have dirt on them. Stay with it.