Clapton Joins Stones for Two New Album Tracks

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For some reason 2016 has been echoing the 1960s ever more loudly as the year goes on, most notably with October’s Desert Trip festival. And now comes news that Eric Clapton has tracked two songs with The Rolling Stones for their promised and what seems ever more likely new studio album to be hopefully released later this year.

According to England’s Sun newspaper, the Stones were recording in Chiswick, London with producer Don Was, and Clapton was working in the adjacent studio. “A source close to the band revealed: ‘Eric was in the next studio along so he came in to say hello. They ended up jamming and recorded two songs.'”

Related: Stones cutting new album

The two superstar acts recorded together once before, 46 years ago. It was a loose-limbed take of their classic song “Brown Sugar” that they’d already cut for their Sticky Fingers album in Muscle Shoals, AL in 1969, tracked again during a shared birthday party for Keith Richards and the late Bobby Keys at Olympic Studios in London in December 1970. The Stones finally released the track last year on their expanded Sticky Fingers reissue. And of course, Clapton’s name was bandied about when Brian Jones left the band, to be replaced by Mick Taylor. And then Taylor quit and Ronnie Wood joined the band.

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The Sun‘s source also said, “Don [Was] reckons it’s the best thing he has ever done with the Stones.” And the producer has worked with the band since 1994.

Even though the recent book The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen makes much of the strained relationship between the band’s founders once know as The Glimmer Twins, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Sun newspaper’s source says that the band is already at work on what could be yet another new studio disc. “They have decided to go back in the studio later this month because they are enjoying it so much.”