Keith Richards says he has just become a great-grandfather, a milestone he greeted with a flat, delighted, “This is true! This is true!” The 82-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said the baby is named Luna Richards-Von Bismarck and joked that he has been doing a lot of grandfathering lately, with “three or four” new grandchildren in the mix, though he admitted he loses track.
The timing matters because Richards is not just marking a family change; he is also fronting a fresh round of attention around a new Rolling Stones album. That keeps one of rock’s longest-running acts in the news again after Blue & Lonesome in 2016 and Hackney Diamonds in 2023, the latter arriving after Charlie Watts died. Richards said the band are making another album now, and he framed the old impulse to quit as a way to push them forward, saying that in 2015 he told his bandmates he was going to retire in an attempt to galvanize them.
For Richards, the family news sits alongside the kind of longevity talk that has followed him for years. He said he tends to listen to his body before it screams for help, said he quit smoking cigarettes six years ago, and said smoking had started to feel childish. He also said he still smokes a lot of weed, is not drinking this week and is otherwise drinking in moderation. The joke that followed cut through the neatness of the health routine: he said, “So, yeah, it’s only a ton of heroin a day now.”
There is a harder edge to the same story. Richards is 82, and the life he describes is one he once seemed unlikely to outlast, even as he keeps working through new material. He said he rejected AI in favor of the old ways, which fits the broader arc of a band still leaning on muscle memory, instinct and hard-earned repetition rather than automation. That is part of why a song such as Some Of Us, which Richards said goes back about 20 years and was cherrypicked from the can by Andrew Watt, still matters inside the album cycle: the new release is being built from old scraps, old habits and old names.
What Richards did not give away was the point readers are waiting for next. Foreign Tongues is the new Rolling Stones album in play, but there is still no release date attached to it. For now, the story is less about a countdown than a familiar band doing what it has done for decades: turning another personal milestone, and another near-mythic survival story, into fuel for one more album run.
