Mick Jagger

Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger feels rather anxious about being Conan O’Brien’s friend. Mick sits down with Conan to discuss the Stones’ 25th studio album Foreign Tongues, his six-decade (and counting) career at the forefront of rock music history, friendly competition with the likes of David Bowie and John Lennon, and finding ways to live in the moment while continuing to draw from the past. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com. Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: (669) 587-2847.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Conan O'Brien?

  Who do you shop for first on the holidays, Sona? Was it, do you shop for the kids or do you shop for Tac?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  My kids.

• 0:07Conan O'Brien?

  Okay.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Or Oki.

• 0:08Conan O'Brien?

  You gotta get them their stuff.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Or my dog.

• 0:09Conan O'Brien?

  And then your husband is last. Well, guess what? It's that time of year. You feel that, you smell that, uh, that cinnamon cider in the air? Do you smell that?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:19Conan O'Brien?

  And you see pumpkins around, people buying turkeys. A little early to buy a turkey.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:24Conan O'Brien?

  Doesn't matter. Holidays? I would say it's just around the corner, but that's a cliche. It's, uh, very nearby in the cupboard. Well, guess what? Amazon delivers joy with low prices on the gifts you want, even this early in the season. So get ahead of the season. Shop early gifts, top picks, holiday decor, and advent calendars at low prices. Get ahead, start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com/holiday.

• 0:55Conan O'Brien?

  Now, Sona, clearly I'm a very important person to you.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:58Conan O'Brien?

  Just accept the premise and we'll move ahead.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00Conan O'Brien?

  I'm a very important person to you. What would you get me from Macy's for the holidays?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Uh, vase.

• 1:07Conan O'Brien?

  No, I don't want a vase. I want something better.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Uh, jacket.

• 1:11Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, nice jacket. I love a nice jacket.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that jacket, nice jacket.

• 1:14Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, so now you have to do it, because you said you would.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Aw, man, I didn't know you were doing that.

• 1:18Conan O'Brien?

  Well, I know the holidays, I know the holidays are months away, but it's never too early, Sona, to find gifts that I will love, gifts I will wear, and surprises that make the season unforgettable for me.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:30Conan O'Brien?

  Macy's Gift Guide makes holiday shopping easy with beauty favorites, stylish fashion, jewelry, cozy essentials, must-have toys, home upgrades, and picks for every person on your list. Coach handbags, Breville appliances, Lego UG, and more, all in one place. You can skip the scrolling and shop with confidence. Shop now in-store or online at macy's.com/giftguide.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Mick Jagger and

• 2:01Speaker 02

  I'm feeling rather anxious about being Conan O'Brien's friend.

• 2:05Conan O'Brien?

  It's a heavy thing.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  It is, and we're in an enclosed, very small space together.

• 2:34Conan O'Brien?

  Hey there, welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. I'm not with the gang today. No Sona, no Gourley, no Blay, no Eduardo. I'm pretty much on my own. Why, you ask? Because I got a phone call, oh, just a couple of days ago. And I'm in Los Angeles. And the question was, would you like to come to London to interview one of the most famous people in the world? And I really thought about it. It was a tough call because I have my Pilates class. I take a Lamaze class, even though I don't know anyone who's pregnant. I just go there and I've been asked to leave. I have my yogurt regimen. But I said, no, I'm gonna do it.

• 3:16Conan O'Brien?

  I'm gonna do it because this is the thrill of a lifetime. So I jumped on a plane and I am now in London in a very small podcast studio. It's off an alley. And I'm excited because I'm talking to just

• 3:37Conan O'Brien?

  a phenomenal force in my life. And I think in many people's lifetime. And this is bucket list for me. Now I'm gonna reveal who it is. Now, If Gourley were here, or Sona, they'd laugh and say, no, it's, the episode is marked with the person's name. People already know you're being stupid. But I'm old fashioned, and so I'm going to pretend you don't know who I'm talking about. My guest today is a rock and roll legend and cultural icon who has spent six decades as the frontman of one of the greatest rock bands of all time, The Rolling Stones. Their new album, Foreign Tongues, is out now. I love this album.

• 4:21Conan O'Brien?

  And I think you have to check it out. It's amazing. This guy's amazing. I'm absolutely honored that he is joining me today.

• 4:34Conan O'Brien?

  Mick Jagger, welcome.

• 4:39Conan O'Brien?

  A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling around the world, shooting my travel show, and I heard you were going to get a phone call from Mick Jagger. Now, we had met briefly backstage at the Oscars, but we didn't really know each other.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 4:52Conan O'Brien?

  The next thing I know, you're calling me, and we're having a chat about this event you asked me to do in Brooklyn to help launch, it's the press launch of the new album, Foreign Tongues. And it was a great day for me, because I'm a massive fan. Of course, I said yes. I asked for money. They said, there's no money.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  They said, there's no money? That's...

• 5:13Conan O'Brien?

  There was nothing. There was no money.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  That's terrible.

• 5:15Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, and I said, I'm just...

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I do apologize, right? I thought they were paying you hundreds of thousands for doing this.

• 5:22Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  It's my going rate.

• 5:23Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I would have said, my going rate is...

• 5:27Conan O'Brien?

  I was, I was like Chuck Berry. I wanted $100,000 in a briefcase before I went on. And so it was a fantastic experience, and I got to be with you, Keith, Ronnie.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:38Conan O'Brien?

  Now, I don't think I had met Ronnie before. He's a lovely guy.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yes, he is.

• 5:43Conan O'Brien?

  Tells a lot of very bad jokes.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Terrible jokes. The only worst joke teller is Bill Wyman, who's not in the band anymore. But he could be co-opted to tell his terrible jokes versus Ronnie. Ronnie versus Bill, their terrible jokes.

• 5:58Conan O'Brien?

  Awful. And I, at one point, and I, and it's, it's, you know, it's Ronnie Wood, he's a legend and a lovely guy.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Legendary comedian.

• 6:07Conan O'Brien?

  A legendary comedian. But at one point, I said, Ronnie, you've got to stop. And I had known him an hour at that point. Uh, but we had a lovely time. And I had some observations about that day, which is, leading up to it, you and I had several phone calls. You were really going over all the details. And then when we got to the event, at one point, you were looking out at the audience to check them. And I looked back, I looked back at Keith and I said, was this Mick in nineteen sixty-two? And he said, yes. And this, I get the sense that in a way, you've always been the organizer, the manager, the guy who's keeping it together. Is that a fair thing to say?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I, I guess so. I mean, sometimes I was called a control freak, but I'm not a control freak at all. I like to delegate. You know, the, the, the thing about doing this kind of thing is you, you, you delegate these big jobs, you know? I never organized that thing that we did, not really. But what did I do? I approved the place, you know? I thought that you would be a great person to do it.

• 7:12Conan O'Brien?

  And were you disappointed?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  I was so happy. It went off really well.

• 7:16Conan O'Brien?

  It was great. It was really, it was very fun.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  You handled Keith's microphone technique perfectly.

• 7:20Conan O'Brien?

  I, I was worried, the minute they gave you guys handheld microphones at this event in, in Brooklyn, you think, well, that can get dodgy.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:28Conan O'Brien?

  And then Keith did a thing where the microphone was by his mouth. And when I'd ask him a question, he would start to answer and the, the, the microphone would drift away from his mouth until the point where I was.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  It's still holding it. This is not drifting away in the air on its own.

• 7:41Conan O'Brien?

  No, no, no. He's holding it, but it's drifting, his arm is drifting away from his body. But we got a laugh out of it. It was fun. Uh, he was lovely, but I, I did get the sense that, not that, I didn't see Control Freak when I saw you, but I saw someone who is very interested in the details.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, some to yourself, that, I mean, this looking through to see, well, you know, I'd seen the room empty, but you, you've got to see the room full, you know, and what's, what kind of people. Are there what you know, how many people are there? What are they? What does the room feel like? I think that's important. I'm sure you, if you, when you go on and do things with a live audience, you know, uh, you, you wanna feel the room, you know, a little bit. You do wanna feel the room because how your behavior would be, you know, how, how the audience is gonna react. I mean, so I think all that sort of stuff's really important.

• 8:31Conan O'Brien?

  What surprised me, very first time I met you, you mentioned the Oscars. I don't know if you remember, but you came up behind me and I'm looking at my notes, what do I have to do next? We're halfway through the show and I feel someone jabbing me in the back saying, how's the crowd? How's the crowd? How's the crowd? In kind of a funny American accent. How's the crowd? How's the crowd? And I turn around, it's you and I said, Mick, you don't care how the crowd is. You're Mick Jagger. And you said, oh, I do.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:56Conan O'Brien?

  Because anyone else in the world who's not you would say, what's he worried about? People are delighted to see you. You're this.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not worried about it, but you want information because you're only on that. You're on the whole show. Good luck. Good luck. I mean, you know, that's a difficult job. Yeah. And, and, and you have to roll with the punches and there's all kinds of weird things happening at the Oscars. People jump on stage and punch people. You know, who knows? Who knows what's gonna happen? You know, I mean, I'm a presenter, you know, which is the lowest category of people appearing on the Oscars. And, uh, usually they read something off the teleprompter.

• 9:35Conan O'Brien?

  Yep.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Which is just not funny.

• 9:37Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  And it, and it's not interesting and they're obviously reading it and, and then they're, you know, it just isn't. So I just rewrote all the stuff they asked me to say and, and made, I wanted to make it into something that was, well, my words.

• 9:51Conan O'Brien?

  Organic to you.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's personal to me, you know?

• 9:53Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  So all these little things you do, uh, you know, cause the good thing about it was I'd done a rehearsal. So you walk onto the stage and they, the weird, also weird, they have the very famous people in cardboard cutouts. Remember that in the rehearsal?

• 10:08Conan O'Brien?

  Yes.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  So there's the Timothy Chalamet cutout. He's just in front of you. So I was gonna make a Bob Dylan reference. I knew, I knew that he was there because he's, I'm staring at the cardboard cutout of him, Scarlett Johansson's there, whatever, whatever. So, so that it was good to do the rehearsal, which was about five minutes.

• 10:27Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  And then, and then, then I shared what was not a dressing room was an office. Didn't have any dressing room things with Neil Young.

• 10:37Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Who who wa- who wasn't on the show and then.

• 10:41Conan O'Brien?

  He just hangs out in dressing rooms.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And I said, yeah, it's just hanging out and I'm going, that's Neil Young over in this office. Hi Neil. And I realized Darryl Hannah was also a presenter.

• 10:49Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, oh, there you go, there you go.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  That was the deal. So Darryl Hannah, Neil Young and I shared an office.

• 10:55Conan O'Brien?

  It's so funny how you've achieved this level that's hard to comprehend where I would think you can be very much in control of what you want to do and how you want to do it. Whenever I see footage of the early Stone shows, when you've really guys have hit and you're in Denmark, you're trying to perform, kids are running up on stage and you're singing and people are jumping on your back.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:23Conan O'Brien?

  Girls are jumping on you and so half of your time is spent.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:27Conan O'Brien?

  Getting out of a headlock.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:30Conan O'Brien?

  By some.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  While singing.

• 11:30Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, while singing.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  And dancing.

• 11:33Conan O'Brien?

  And dancing.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  All at the same time.

• 11:34Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Those are the days.

• 11:36Conan O'Brien?

  Do those moments occur to you now, every now and then, because things are so locked down now in a great way.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:42Conan O'Brien?

  But those early days were just so chaotic.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  There was no, see, the thing was in those days, there wasn't any um, organization for these concerts.

• 11:51Conan O'Brien?

  Right.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  And the organization was minimal. There was no really security. So if there was security, it was the, it was the local police. And the local police had no experience of a concert audience. They'd probably never done it before.

• 12:04Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  And the, in some places like, we, we used to play in like, the west coast in little places. And the police would come out and there would be like fourteen year old girls and they'd bang them on the heads with their nightsticks. That was their solution. And it's like, huh?

• 12:18Conan O'Brien?

  We took care of it.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  This, whack. These could be your daughters.

• 12:21Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Maybe they are.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Bang, you know? And it was the same in Europe, you know?

• 12:29Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  I mean, they would just throw them, you know, out of the door bodily. I mean, it was just chaotic.

• 12:35Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, the other thing that strikes me, which has changed so much, not to embarrass you, but you reached this iconic level where if someone were to make a short list of who are the greatest entertainers of the twentieth, early twenty first century, you know, and I'm including everybody, you're an Al Jolson, uh, you know, Michael Jackson, you're on the very, very short list of this, this iconic performer.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  I want to see Al Jolson and Michael Jackson as a duo.

• 13:08Conan O'Brien?

  Al Jolson like, and then moonwalks right past him.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's a good one.

• 13:15Conan O'Brien?

  But you know, you're in this position and the press, I don't think people today understand how hostile the media was.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:25Conan O'Brien?

  Towards all pop groups.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:26Conan O'Brien?

  But then specifically, they just decided, and it was kind of a press creation.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:32Conan O'Brien?

  The Rolling Stone, they're bad, they're punks before punks.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  They were bad. Rolling Stone's bad, dirty. Uh, Rolling Stones, um, you know, scary, uh, shouldn't be allowed. And yeah, and that, that's just sort of press stuff. But people were actually, obviously people were really welcoming uh, in, in most places. But there was, there was a group that were really not welcoming. But they maybe didn't know who even know who you were, but they would just shout names at you. They didn't know who you were. That, that, they, they would just shout names. So it was very polarized.

• 14:04Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  In, you know, in a kind of modern way, just the look of you, which when you look at the pictures is pretty normal.

• 14:12Conan O'Brien?

  It's tame now.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Very tame.

• 14:14Conan O'Brien?

  But.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  But in those days it wasn't. So it's hard to, hard, it's, that's why it's so hard to imagine because you, we look pretty normal. And, you know, and, but not for those people that, you know, especially in the US. When we first went there, like, say sixty four, in the, in the outside of New York and LA, that, that, that was, that was, they, we were like, uh, freaks for them.

• 14:37Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. It was also, I, I was always careful in my comedy career. A new band would come up or a new performer who looked strange and my writers would say, let's make fun of that person. I would say, I do not want to be, because this footage doesn't age well.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:52Conan O'Brien?

  If this person goes on to be iconic.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:54Conan O'Brien?

  Um, and this is when, you know, bands were coming on my show for the first time. There'd be their first TV experience would be a No Doubt or a Green Day.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:03Conan O'Brien?

  And I'm glad that I was welcoming and didn't make any jokes because they would look so stupid now.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:10Conan O'Brien?

  In the nineteen sixties, all performers decided that these long haired freaks.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:17Conan O'Brien?

  From England. England were a passing fad.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:19Conan O'Brien?

  They had no conception that this was going to be the music that dominated people's lives for the next sixty years. They didn't know.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Well, no one knew that. No one knew that. And so it was easy for them to be to be patronizing and to make a joke of it. Cause it's an easy, cheap gag, you know?

• 15:37Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  I mean, Dean Martin did it, you know, like famously, um, Ed Sullivan. We went on a lot. He didn't do it. He, Ed Sullivan didn't do anything, really. He just, he was, that was a different kind of person, but he didn't. I don't think Ed, I think Ed Sullivan knew that he got good ratings because when the Beatles went on, Ed Sullivan, whatever Ed Sullivan thought of the Beatles, that he got great ratings when they went on. So he knew what you're saying, that I, it's no point in me making fun of them. Cause who knows what's gonna happen?

• 16:09Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  You know, but I mean, there were a lot of exceptions. There were talk show people, say, maybe local. I can't remember all their names now, like Mike Wallace and all the, they had, they were willing to have serious conversations with you. They respected you a bit more. There were others that did not, and you didn't do their shows, so.

• 16:28Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, it's just interesting now, I think, I don't think people today understand, not that they should, but the environment that you guys were in, in sixty four, sixty five, sixty six, actually all through most of the sixties.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  It was a hostile environment, particularly in America. I'm not only America. I mean, we can't, we're not, I'm not blaming America for, for being the only. There were hostile in England. There was a lot of hostility, but the, but America was not really ready for this stuff, really. They weren't, you know, and, and, and, and obviously things changed. I mean, it didn't take long when you think about it in, in years, like you said, sixty four, by, by sixty six, it was changed a lot, you know, so two or three years.

• 17:14Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, there are a lot of singers or entertainers that get to this point in their career and they get very nostalgic. And they start singing or writing a lot about their childhood or looking back. And what I find interesting is you do not strike me as a nostalgic writer. You're very interested in what's happening right now. I think that's a, and I say that in a very positive way. When I listen to foreign tongues, there's no really looking back. This is music that you made for someone to listen to in two thousand twenty six, twenty seven. And there's no leaning on this vast history that you have. Is that fair to say?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. That's not really, I don't really do that. I mean, I'm quite happy to talk about, like we just talked about.

• 18:05Conan O'Brien?

  Yep, yep.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  You know.

• 18:06Conan O'Brien?

  The early days.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  The early days of going to the United States or going to Holland or Denmark or whatever we talked about. I'm quite happy to remember that if I can. It's hard, it's so long ago, it's hard to really remember. But no, I mean, I'm not drawing, in this foreign tongues album, lyrically, I'm not drawing on nostalgia. Or, I mean, obviously you're drawing on past experiences, but they might be recent past experiences. There could be any, but they're not referred back. And musically speaking, every time Andy Watt, the producer, would make a, producers always like references. So which is outstanding because you, you go like, this is a bit like this song you did previously. It's to explain to the musicians to their relatability to this song.

• 18:52Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  It's, it's a bit, it's a, think of it a bit like this, you know? And then, that's fine, but then I said to Andy, but yeah, but don't, don't make references musically. Don't, there was one track, I think, Mr. Charm.

• 19:06Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  And at the end of it, he said, well, it could be a bit more like jumping Jack Flash at the end. I said, no, it's not anything like that. And I don't want you to refer to it. And I mean, we didn't have an argument about it. So I said, just don't make it like that. We're not going to encourage anyone to overdub guitars like that. And so I didn't want any references to that, if you know what I mean.

• 19:28Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  So, so, um, and I'm, I've heard that Paul McCartney's record has some of this that you're talking about. I, I haven't yet got round to listening to it. Apologize, Paul. I will. I will do because it's been talked about a lot and I've heard it's very good. Uh, but I haven't listened to it yet. So, um.

• 19:46Conan O'Brien?

  Now, in the old days, would you have gotten a track by the Beatles or a competitor right away and listened to it? Listen to that record that maybe you could?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 19:54Conan O'Brien?

  You're beyond all that now.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I just, I'm not beyond it. I, I just keep forgetting. I'm being so busy. I just keep forgetting to listen to it.

• 20:01Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Uh, um, I'm, I've been running around doing promotion and

• 20:05Conan O'Brien?

  Sure.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And, and, and I just haven't been listening to current music very much.

• 20:10Conan O'Brien?

  I could sing it to you.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. I'm ready. How's it go? What's the lead track? What's it called? What's it called? Do you remember what it's called? What's the lead?

• 20:17Conan O'Brien?

  I don't remember.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 20:20Conan O'Brien?

  Come on. No, he's, what is it? Dungeon Alley? Dungeon?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I've heard this. This is, this, I've heard the title.

• 20:24Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  What, what does that refer to?

• 20:26Conan O'Brien?

  I think it's a street in Liverpool that was like an alley that led down to. So he's singing about Liverpool. He's looking back. Um.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  So on Hanny Diamonds, on, on the, on the track called Hole, Hole Wide World, I did refer back

• 20:39Conan O'Brien?

  Right.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  A little bit, um, to Student Diggs days and everything, but it was a pretty oblique reference, but it was there. There was two lines about it.

• 20:56Conan O'Brien?

  You know, winning an award, that's a big achievement, right?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:58Conan O'Brien?

  Every now and then in life, maybe something nice like that comes your way. Winning them consistently is almost impossible. It just doesn't happen, you know? Well, guess what? Winning five times in six years? You know what that sounds like to me? Sustained excellence.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 21:13Conan O'Brien?

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• 21:22Speaker 01

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• 21:26Conan O'Brien?

  I've been tooling around in an Ioniq 5N, which I love.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:31Conan O'Brien?

  Beautiful car. Well, listen, whether you need an SUV for everyday life, your next big adventure, or extra room for family and friends, Hyundai has an option for you. The Tucson Hybrid is loaded with technology and built for everyday life. The Santa Fe Hybrid's fully capable and ready for adventure. The Palisade, that's yours, right?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 21:46Conan O'Brien?

  They're gonna rename that. At the Sona. The Palisade Hybrid.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  It should.

• 21:50Conan O'Brien?

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• 22:21Conan O'Brien?

  Did you know that one in four Americans targeted by scams end up falling for them? You fell for it.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I fell for a scam.

• 22:27Conan O'Brien?

  Now, you didn't lose too much money, but you did lose.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  I did lose, and it was very inconvenient. And now they put protections on my account like I'm, uh, dumb.

• 22:35Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, I don't know where they got that impression. Criminals are now using AI to make scams look more realistic than ever. In 2025, AI fraud spiked 1,210% and cost Americans $893 million. That's incredible. Well, with AI, it can get so smart now.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:56Conan O'Brien?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Maybe I should start scamming.

• 22:58Conan O'Brien?

  No, that's not the point.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that's not the point of this.

• 23:00Conan O'Brien?

  That's not the point.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  It's so much money.

• 23:02Conan O'Brien?

  One accidental click, Sona can expose your information, putting you at risk of identity theft. Luckily, this is the point. Not that you should start scamming, but that everyone should get LifeLock.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 23:12Conan O'Brien?

  LifeLock has live, U.S.-based restoration specialists who will be with you every step of the way to fix your identity theft from first alert to full restoration. This is fantastic. How do you not have this? If you have expenses or money stolen due to identity theft, you're backed by the million-dollar protection package with up to $3 million coverage in some plans. Join now and save up to 30% off your first year. Go to lifelock.com/conan. That's lifelock.com/conan to save 30%. Terms apply.

• 23:42Conan O'Brien?

  Who do you shop for first on the holidays, Sona? Was it, do you shop for the kids or do you shop for Tac?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  My kids.

• 23:47Conan O'Brien?

  Okay.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Or Oki.

• 23:48Conan O'Brien?

  You gotta get them your stuff.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Or my dog.

• 23:49Conan O'Brien?

  And then your husband is last. Well, guess what? It's that time of year. You feel that, you smell that, uh, that cinnamon cider in the air? Do you smell that?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:59Conan O'Brien?

  And you see pumpkins around, people buying turkeys. A little early to buy a turkey.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:04Conan O'Brien?

  Doesn't matter. Holidays? I would say it's just around the corner, but that's a cliche. It's, uh, very nearby in the cupboard. Well, guess what? Amazon delivers joy with low prices on the gifts you want, even this early in the season. So get ahead of the season. Shop early gifts, top picks, holiday decor, and advent calendars at low prices. Get ahead, start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com/holiday.

• 24:38Conan O'Brien?

  Listening to the album, you mentioned Mr. Charm, so I'm gonna bring this up. I don't think any singer does attitude better than you. It's so interesting, because I will do another reference, but in Mr. Charm, I get some of the, it's not a reference, but some of the delicious, kind of, uh, almost oily disdain that you can hear in, like, uh, um, Sympathy for the Devil. There's a little bit of, there's this great attitude, and you do it in, I'm a big fan of the show Slow Horses. You do, uh, the theme song.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:10Conan O'Brien?

  I love the attitude that you possess and inhabit when you're singing that song.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Which one, to Mr. Charm?

• 25:18Conan O'Brien?

  Well, Mr. Charm, but also...

• 25:19Speaker 02

  The, the, the slow...

• 25:21Conan O'Brien?

  The Slow Horses theme. Yeah. Which is, you know, it, it, it's very kind of almost burlesque, but...

• 25:27Speaker 02

  It's called Strange Game.

• 25:28Conan O'Brien?

  Strange Game, yeah. I think I saw you once said in an interview that, yes, the lyrics are important, but really it's the sound.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:36Conan O'Brien?

  And you have this, I can tell you think a lot about, what is this gonna sound like? Because some very strange things in, like, doo-wop music.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:46Conan O'Brien?

  Sounded great, but when you look at what it says...

• 25:49Speaker 02

  It's rubbish.

• 25:50Conan O'Brien?

  It's just... Absolute rubbish and it's the sound and I think of so many Stones records and so many of your vocalizations as it's a great shattered or you know and and on this record there's a great attitude and a sound to what you are singing that I think adds a lot to the lyrics.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  I think in attitudes though, you know, it's like it's acting really. Cause you you you're you're taking on the character of this of the song, you know. And when you do a love song, say like Back in Your Life or The Jilted Lover, you're playing The Jilted Lover. So obviously that's happened to you before, but I mean, so but but that's a whole different attitude. It's a different person, you you know, you so when you come to do. I mean, it's easier in the recording studio because you you don't have to do one after another.

• 26:42Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  And on stage it's but you have to switch personas, you know, quickly. You know, you go from Symphony of Daryl to a ballad, you know, whatever, but you don't do that.

• 26:51Conan O'Brien?

  You almost want a screen to come down for a second so you can inhabit a new person.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  You want to inhabit another space, you know. So when you get into a song in the studios, but remember you haven't done that song that many times.

• 27:02Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  You know, Eve might have done a demo of it. In that case, in this case of Mr. Charm, I did a demo. So I I wasn't like walking into doing a song that I didn't know. Uh, I knew it, but I had to make it much better than the demo, you know.

• 27:15Conan O'Brien?

  Right.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And I rewrote the lyrics and everything. And then you you start to get into the character of this. The and and like in that song, there's two attitudes. So there's the verse attitude where you're kind of trying to be beguiling. And then there's the chorus attitude where you're kind of throwing something else away. You you know, saying life's too short, just make money and what. So it's a slightly different different attitude. Then you come back to the verse where you're then, you know, throwing sort of these kind of scattered gun images out, you know, in what you hope is a kind of interesting way.

• 27:54Conan O'Brien?

  I listened to this album. I listened to it a bunch because I really like it. And uh.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 28:00Conan O'Brien?

  I noticed that, yes, I can see, obviously, you guys famously started as a blues band, but there's blues in here, there's rock and roll, there's also country. Again, I think you've always been interested in many different genres of kind of music. And I was very interested in the country aspect of the album because I know that if I didn't know any better, I'd think, well, country couldn't have been an influence, but it was an influence.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Country was a huge influence for me. On, well, I think on every, uh, most English musicians of that period. Don't forget, these songs were also be, a lot of these country songs were big hits.

• 28:38Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  They were like top 10 hits, like as they were in the US, you know? But, you know, people like Eddie Arnold and all these people, they had huge hits. They were pop hits. Even though they were country songs. And then you got on to people like George Jones and they were played on the radio. So this wasn't obscure, you know, the blues was more obscure. These were hits. Uh, the Everly Brothers were country.

• 29:02Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  I mean, really.

• 29:03Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  I mean, they were pop, but they're still country. And, and Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash had a number one record with, uh, Ballad of a Teenage Queen.

• 29:12Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  So as soon as you heard that and you liked Johnny Cash, you would explore more Johnny Cash. And you'd realize that he was a country singer.

• 29:19Conan O'Brien?

  And so you realize when you listen to 1954 Elvis Sun Session. It's a click and a half away from country. It's rockabilly.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:27Conan O'Brien?

  But if you slowed it down a little bit.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:30Conan O'Brien?

  The instrumentation, it's so close to country.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  So close, but he was covering rhythm and blues songs a lot of times. I mean, of course, he did standards like Blue Moon.

• 29:41Conan O'Brien?

  Yep.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  In those kinds, in the same period we're talking about. Though, obviously, these, these songs like That's All Right, Mama, which is, I think, the first one he did.

• 29:50Conan O'Brien?

  He did first one, yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  And, and that was a R and B song. And then he did Hound Dog. That was an R and B song. They're all, these were all R and B songs. So even though we say, yeah, he's so country. He was covering R and B in a kind of slightly different country way.

• 30:08Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  I, I'm not sure. I'm not a great Elvis student, but I, I mean, I love Elvis and all that, but did he really do country music as we know it?

• 30:17Conan O'Brien?

  No, probably more, well, gospel. He loved gospel.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yes, gospel he did.

• 30:20Conan O'Brien?

  Loved gospel, um, but you can see that, you're right, those early influences. I think it's a, it's a gumbo. There's country is, is part of his makeup, but much more so gospel, rhythm and blues. I'm just, you never met, did you meet Elvis?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  No, I never met Elvis.

• 30:36Conan O'Brien?

  That's incredible to me.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  You know why? I'll tell you why. The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists. You always did publicity with the Daily Mirror and the Beatles did it. And there was a Chobis journalist, I can't remember his name, very famous at the time. And he took the Beatles in Los Angeles to visit with Elvis.

• 30:56Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And they, there's pictures of this.

• 30:58Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  So they, they went up to Elvis's house and his pool and.

• 31:03Conan O'Brien?

  They walked in and he was playing bass.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Was he?

• 31:05Conan O'Brien?

  Watching TV, playing bass.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:07Conan O'Brien?

  But they were all high. The Beatles were high and they, none of them have their story straight. None of them can remember.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  They don't remember anything. But I remember John telling me, you know, you should never meet your heroes. I would, I would never meet Elvis Mick if I were you.

• 31:22Conan O'Brien?

  That's fascinating, yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  And so I didn't. I took John's advice.

• 31:26Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  It was really stupid of me, really, but I mean, I would love to have met Elvis. Why I take John's advice?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  But I mean, at the time.

• 31:35Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It seemed to ring, well, that means.

• 31:38Conan O'Brien?

  No, no, he, he famously in the sixty four tour, he kept saying, the minute they got to America, John kept saying, where's Elvis? Where's Elvis? Where's Elvis? That's all the only person he wanted to meet. Then they met Elvis. Uh, and in Bel Air at his house. John walked out and said, where's Elvis? Because that was not the guy he wanted to meet.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:57Conan O'Brien?

  He disappointed him.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he told me that all this story.

• 32:01Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  More than once.

• 32:02Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  And, and so it sort of put me off. So I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis.

• 32:10Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  And so I didn't want my version of Elvis chatted like John's was, but maybe my Elvis version would have been different.

• 32:18Conan O'Brien?

  Well, I have to tell you, I've always wanted to sit and talk with you and this is a massive disappointment.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can imagine it is. Here we are, stuck in this little tiny room in West London.

• 32:28Conan O'Brien?

  I'm gonna leave and go, where's Mick Jagger?

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And, and yeah, and I, I was, I was enjoying being Casablanca. This is crap.

• 32:35Conan O'Brien?

  I did have a good time in Casablanca. And, you know, there's something about this album, Foreign Tongues. I was thinking, you're not nostalgic. I can feel an urgency. There's a sense that you guys got into the studio. I know you made it very quickly. And what I'm very impressed by is it almost feels like you've got something to prove, which you don't, but that's how it feels. A lot of these songs really feel like you're having a great time, but let's get this shit and get it right. Is that, is that fair?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair. I mean, but that's, that's our modus operandi for when we did Hackney Diamonds.

• 33:16Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  You know, it was a way of working. So the previous way with the bands obviously had a lot of ways of working in a studio.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  And, and when we did Hackney Diamonds, that was a different way of doing it. It's like, okay, we've got these songs. We got them prepped a bit, at least they're done. We're not writing songs in the studio, which a lot of bands do. We used to do. If something comes up in the studio, fantastic. And this might change, this song may change completely and utterly, but you have an idea and we're going to plow through them. We're not going to hang around. We're not going to wait. We're not going to play them all day. We're going to do them for a couple of hours and then we'll move on to the next one. And if we'll come back the next day, we might do it again or might come back next week and do it again. So we're always moving ahead, always plowing ahead. So there's no time for too much self-analysis of whether it's the songs any good, whether the performance is any good.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  We'll find out because when it's all finished, we'll, we'll listen to them all, you know, and see what have we got after we've done four weeks? What have we got left? What was good? Which are your favorites? Which ones do you know you don't like? Is, is this, does this all stand up? Because we want to set the bar high.

• 34:26Conan O'Brien?

  Sure.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Because we don't want to have, we said in Hackney Diamonds and this, we don't want to any filler. We want to set the bar high. So every track has to have something special about it. Okay, some might be, you might be your favorites, but it doesn't mean so that the other ones don't have something to say.

• 34:42Conan O'Brien?

  Well, Rough and Twisted, I love. In the Stars, obviously you guys knew we've got something really great here.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:48Conan O'Brien?

  Love the video.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 34:51Conan O'Brien?

  In the Stars is fantastic. You guys sort of reimagined as your younger selves and it's it's it's great. It's fantastic.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  It was only AI with the faces.

• 35:02Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Everything else is real.

• 35:04Conan O'Brien?

  And you told me that at one point they got a little screwed up because you thought Ronnie Wood doesn't look right. Their young, young you looks great, young Keith looks great. They they made sort of, they tried to make a faces era Ronnie Wood.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  No, I said to, I said to, we were talking with this, um, the lady that I'm working with on the video. So they're doing this AI and I said, stop it at three eighteen. I said, I said to us, just we're on, we're on Zoom. I said, stop it at three eighteen. I said, that's Jeff Beck.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Ronnie, that's not, your guy, your guy is, he's referring to Jeff, he's got the right, because.

• 35:42Conan O'Brien?

  AI makes mistakes.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  The thing was, the thing was that Ronnie was in a band with Jeff Beck.

• 35:47Conan O'Brien?

  Yes.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  So so then I've gone back to this footage and said, I, I, I don't, please don't bother me about this. I know exactly who these people are. And he got, and it looked exactly like Jeff Beck. So we had Jeff Beck in the band for a minute there. That was interesting. So I said, now you've got to change it to Ronnie. Because the Keith and I images were taken from Sympathy for the Devil.

• 36:07Conan O'Brien?

  Yep.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Most, mostly, not, it's not quite that simple.

• 36:10Conan O'Brien?

  Was it Godard who made the, he made a movie?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Of course, someone famous, a famous French film director.

• 36:16Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, a French filmmaker. And I know at the time you were thinking, why is he shooting us, creating? And now it's a great document.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the only one like that. It's the only one that exists from the sixties.

• 36:26Conan O'Brien?

  You know what's another great piece of footage is there's this great footage of you and Keith. You've just come back from recording in Muscle Shoals. You go into a room, I'm sure you've seen this. You walk into a room and you've got the demo for, I think it's, um, Brown Sugar.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:42Conan O'Brien?

  You put it on and you're listening to it. It's not out yet, but you're listening to it and you see you start to, both of you start to groove to this thing. And you start strutting around the room and you have the same reaction that later on, everybody's going to have. Which is, this is a great track, but it's you guys hearing it for the first time.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're hearing the rough mix or something.

• 37:07Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Is that in Gimme Shelter by, um, the Maisel Brothers?

• 37:10Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah. It's great. It's just a it's just a great moment. You as a fan of the Rolling Stones.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can be that.

• 37:18Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  I can also be their severest critic.

• 37:21Conan O'Brien?

  Is that true?

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Well, you kind of have to be sometimes, you know, I mean, and sometimes you're wrong, you know, you can be very wrong because you're not a very good critic of your own work. One one is not a good critic of one's own work, really. But, you know, you are the first person that hears it after all in in in in reality.

• 37:41Conan O'Brien?

  I have to ask you, I mentioned this when we talked in Brooklyn, but I have to bring it up. Your voice sounds as good as ever. There are times where I think it's better than ever. It's defies logic, but I know that you are an extremely disciplined guy about your health and taking care of yourself. But you listen to this album and I think this is a this is a 28 year old singer. It's really amazing.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's that's very kind of you to say that.

• 38:12Conan O'Brien?

  And you're doing falsetto stuff on on foreign tongues?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Pretty easy. I find that kind of easy. That's not, I mean, people have given me lots of confidence about that. And to be honest, that's the and I appreciate the kindness, but that that some of the other songs are much more difficult than that. That one's relatively easy to do. Um, I learnt I learnt falsetto singing very early on in the Stones career when I listened to Don Cavie. He was a soul singer and he was singing this song called Have Mercy. Don Cavie also wrote Chain of Fools for Aretha Franklin. He's he was a songwriter as well, and I met him a few occasions. Anyway, but on his song Have Mercy, he sings only in falsetto.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  So then I copied that and we covered that song. I mean, I'm sure my version is useless compared to her. I'm I was practicing. But that kind of falsetto singing is relatively easy because you never change from falsetto back into your regular voice. That's the difficult thing to do. The difficult thing is going in and out of falsetto.

• 39:15Conan O'Brien?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  So I can't really do that very well. Like, the person that does that brilliantly is Al Green.

• 39:21Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  So if you listen to Al Green, and I was, you know, last month, I was, I put on this Al Green record, and I hadn't heard it for a while. And I said, I was analyzing what he was doing with his vocal. And he was, hey, so he's going falsetto, and then he's going back in the same line, he's going back to his regular voice. And then he's going back falsetto. I said, okay, I see. So I've got to do that too. I have to learn how to do that. And so I just sang along with Al Green trying to do it. I mean, it's not easy, but it's possible.

• 39:51Conan O'Brien?

  I learned this a long time ago, which is I, I, very few people sort of in your caliber. But I remembered once getting to see Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band perform. And then I got taken backstage because my drummer for years, Max Weinberg, is Bruce's drummer. He took me backstage and I got to hang out with Bruce a little bit just after the show. And he at one point had been trying to, had been singing in this falsetto. And I said, that was, that was great. I love that part. And I didn't realize you could do that. And he said, yeah, I'm really working on it. And I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying. And I thought, this is fascinating. I see the same thing with you.

• 40:28Conan O'Brien?

  Everyone else would assume that you've got nothing left, left to try, but of course you do.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Those are things you can do.

• 40:36Conan O'Brien?

  And, and you are still thinking, yeah, I'm, I'm going to listen to this Al Green record and, okay, what's he doing here? And I want to work on that.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I haven't, I haven't mastered that. So in the studio, so I do like a song like Jealous Lover.

• 40:50Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  So I, so I can sing the falsetto part in the verse first, and then, then the chorus is in full voice. And then you layer it with lots of harmonies that I did in falsetto and full voice. But then I'm not really doing the Al Green thing. I'm doing one set in falsetto and one set in full voice. You know, so, so, I mean, it's not cheating. That's just, this is the way I layered it.

• 41:17Conan O'Brien?

  But I do, I do think there's something about, we all have our heroes. It's your attempt to be your hero that fails, but, and in the failing of being exactly like the person you idolize, you create something that's yours.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  New comes out.

• 41:32Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  And you can't be that. I mean.

• 41:34Conan O'Brien?

  You guys were listening to blues and saying, we want to do that. And it's, of course, it's different. You're from Dartford. It's gonna be different.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  I can't be Howling Wolf, you know.

• 41:43Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I mean, but but you do have, I'm never tried to sound like Howling Wolf. Nobody can, nobody sounds like Howling Wolf, not even. I've never heard anyone. But yeah, you're absolutely right. You, you, you, while you're copying people, you create something new.

• 41:58Conan O'Brien?

  You know, we were talking about how so much has changed. One of the things that this first wave of uh, pop stars in the sixties faced was, well, you can't be doing this when you're not in your twenties. Once you're, you know, once you're twenty eight, twenty nine, this is for young kids to do. You can't be doing this. There's a great clip I saw. It's backstage. It might be Madison Square Garden. I think it's late sixties. Dick Cavett's talking to you and he said, you think you'll be doing this when you're sixty? And he said, and you have a cane? And you said, sure. You said a lot of, you said Marlene Dietrich is still out there and she's amazing.

• 42:40Conan O'Brien?

  And I thought that's such a great answer because I think the standard answer then was, well, of course not, of course not. But you said, why not?

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:48Conan O'Brien?

  Why not?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, that there had been, I mean, see, the thing about rock music is associated with, always associated with youth. It's the, it was the music of rebellious youth, so to speak. And um, I mean, most rock bands are young. And you want there to be young rock bands and, you know, it sort of comes and goes and there's been a slight revival of it now. But you thought that that, once you're out of the flush of youth, you wouldn't continue. But rock music kind of evolved, I suppose, in a way as well. And it also remained the popular music with the, with the same group of people that were in your same age group. They still liked it. So they didn't move on to some other music as, they might have moved on, but they still kept a

• 43:33Speaker 02

  a, a, a thing for their youth, you know, those.

• 43:36Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  So, and you want, obviously, so, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, there were, there were people. I mean Frank Sinatra was still a big star and he was when he was old, but it's a different kind of music. You don't need quite as much energy to do Frank Sinatra as you need to do the Sex Pistols. I mean, you, you, or the Ramones, or to do Hit Me In The Head.

• 43:57Conan O'Brien?

  What I think, I mean, I, I can't, I'm hard pressed to think of anybody who expends more energy on stage still. As you, you're in constant motion. I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that for fifteen minutes. Uh, let alone a, a two hour plus show. So, you know, I, I, the stamina that you have, I know you work at it. I'm wondering, does any of that come from the fact that your dad was a, a gymnast and a physical fitness guy? Did you think that you grew up a little bit with that? Like I gotta take care of myself?

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, he kept telling me you have to take care of yourself. You, you know, if you don't take care of yourself, you're gonna be. And he pointed at someone like who was fifty-five, who was fat and smoking in an armchair.

• 44:38Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  You'd be like your uncle so-and-so.

• 44:41Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, you don't wanna be like that. I was like, no, no, I don't. Yeah, but it goes in, you know, when you're young, that, that sticks with you. So, yeah.

• 44:50Conan O'Brien?

  I would have been, I don't know, twelve years old, I think, when Elvis turned forty. And the National Enquirer was just vicious.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:57Conan O'Brien?

  About Elvis turning forty because he was the real first wave of rock and roll.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 45:02Conan O'Brien?

  So he's, you know, um, he's another generation older than you guys. And he was the first one to get, isn't this absurd that this man is still doing this at forty?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:17Conan O'Brien?

  Which now, nobody thinks about.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  He wasn't in very good shape.

• 45:20Conan O'Brien?

  No, he wasn't.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  That was the thing. I mean, and then he got back in shape. He, he, he came, he did a great comeback thing where he looked amazing. But for a while, he wa, he, why he was such a figure of fun, I'm not saying the National Enquirer is, is the paper of record. But, uh, it, why he was, everyone used to take the mick out of him was because he did get overweight. And he did, and he obviously wasn't in a, very fit.

• 45:46Conan O'Brien?

  No.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  And, and, and he wasn't very old. I mean, this is all, and how old was he when he died?

• 45:51Conan O'Brien?

  He was forty.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, which we now we would consider quite young for.

• 45:56Conan O'Brien?

  Well, this is how screwed up things are. I was in high school when I would have been seventeen, sixteen or seventeen, when my sister Kate knocked on the door and opened the door. It was in the morning in nineteen eighty and she told me John Lennon was shot and died. And I was lying in bed and I said, what? And she said, yes. And I said, how old was he? And she said, forty. And I said, well, at least he had a long life. That's what I said. Now I am sixty three now. I don't think forty is a long life. I don't sixty, I don't think sixty three is a long life, but that was my perspective then.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 46:36Conan O'Brien?

  It's insane.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, today, I know this is not going out until later, but David Hockney just died.

• 46:42Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  And he was creating experimental art. And he was eighty seven years old and he never stopped.

• 46:48Conan O'Brien?

  Never stopped.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  He never stopped, not just repeating himself. He didn't repeat himself. That was the great thing. He, he, he, he just carried on, you know, trying different things and trying different ways of expressing himself and.

• 47:04Conan O'Brien?

  Foreign Tongues album, is that you?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  I mean, he was amazing. And eighty seven, I mean, he was still painting this year.

• 47:17Conan O'Brien?

  You know, winning an award, that's a big achievement, right?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:20Conan O'Brien?

  Every now and then in life, maybe something nice like that comes your way. Winning them consistently is almost impossible. It just doesn't happen, you know? Well, guess what? Winning five times in six years? You know what that sounds like to me? Sustained excellence.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 47:35Conan O'Brien?

  Hyundai has done just that, earning the title of America's best SUV brand for twenty twenty six from U S News and World Report. You are a very happy Hyundai driver.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  I drive a Hyundai Palisade and I love my car. I love it. I love driving it around.

• 47:48Conan O'Brien?

  I've been tooling around in an Ioniq five N, which I love.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 47:52Conan O'Brien?

  Beautiful car. Well, listen, whether you need an SUV for everyday life, your next big adventure or extra room for family and friends, Hyundai has an option for you. The Tucson Hybrid is loaded with technology and built for everyday life. The Santa Fe Hybrid is fully capable and ready for adventure. The Palisade, that's yours, right?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 48:08Conan O'Brien?

  They're gonna rename that the Sona. The Palisade Hybrid, yeah, delivers premium capability and class-leading interior space with available, I had this memorized, H-Track all-wheel drive, up to an EPA-estimated 619 miles of range on vehicles like the Palisade Hybrid and Hyundai's industry-leading warranty. It's easy to see why Hyundai continues to deliver the quality, innovation, technology, and value drivers expect from an award-winning brand. View U.S. News Best Cars at cars.usnews.com and call 562-314-4603 for complete details. Owning a car or home comes with responsibilities. Sure, it's fun, but sometimes it makes you wonder why you ever longed for adulthood in the first place. I do that all the time. I'm like, oh, these bills, these bills.

• 48:53Conan O'Brien?

  What am I gonna do?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Conan O'Brien?

  You know, when you own a house, you gotta fix it yourself. Sona, you see this to be true, right?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, your garage door breaks, and you're like, well, I have to fix it.

• 49:02Conan O'Brien?

  Probably at first you said, hey, I'll get the super to fix it. It's your house, dude.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  It's mine, dude.

• 49:07Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. In fact, they work overtime to tailor your insurance policy around what you actually need. The only thing they can't do is get that Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty jingle out of your head.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.

• 49:21Conan O'Brien?

  Liberty, Liberty, it's in my head all the time.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 49:23Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. Start your quote at libertymutual.com.

• 49:30Conan O'Brien?

  Sona, you have to admit, the holidays, it's really about hanging with the people you love.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:36Conan O'Brien?

  And getting to be yourself, not going to some stuffy holiday party where you need to conform to what the man wants you to think about the holidays.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:45Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, it's about being yourself. Turn your holiday time into Miller time by enjoying a Miller Lite in a place where you're free to enjoy yourself on a walk with a cousin. With a cousin? Why are they getting all specific about?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Because it's family.

• 49:57Conan O'Brien?

  But what about a niece or a nephew?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Conan O'Brien?

  Like a walk with an ex-wife? I don't know. I mean, they're just throwing, that's a weird, they just made a very specific choice.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:08Conan O'Brien?

  Now's the time for those unexpected holiday side guests and enjoy a great tasting light beer. 'Tis Miller time, as Dickens wrote. Miller Lite is brewed for taste, the taste you can depend on. The original light beer since 1975 and still iconic more than 50 years later. I like to be with my bros, my chums, my posse, crack open a Miller Lite, take a swig, a sip, look around and see my friends. We've known each other forever and we're just hanging out.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you guys are just doing chest bumps and high fiving.

• 50:38Conan O'Brien?

  Miller Lite is great taste done right. Go to millerlite.com/conan to find delivery options near you, or you can pick up some Miller Lite pretty much anywhere they sell beer. Tis Miller time. Celebrate responsibly, Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 96 calories and 3.2 carbs per 12 ounces.

• 51:00Conan O'Brien?

  I have to ask you, is the harmonica that I hear on the Foreign Tones album, is that you?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:05Conan O'Brien?

  It's, okay.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Ronnie plays the harmonica, but he doesn't play on this album.

• 51:09Conan O'Brien?

  Well, also, there's a, there's a great quote, a Keith quote. Keith is a huge admirer of your harmonica playing and he said, that is, that's the, that's the, you know, there are many, Mick can assume many forms, that is, he always felt your harmonica playing was the key into that's the core Mick Jagger. That's the Apple logo that comes up when you've turned on the computer for the first time, is you want harmonica. Do you think that's close to something true?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  It's kind of true, but the thing is, in a, I think in a funny way, uh, the, the harmonica is a, is an extension of a voice, you know, cause it's a blown instrument and you're, we go, you're making it go wah wah, you know, it's, it's a voice extension thing. So I think it's a, for, for a vocalist, it's a good extension of, of a voice, you know, so a natural instrument of a voice. Of course, what I like doing is playing punk guitar. So that's what I really like doing, so, so.

• 52:04Conan O'Brien?

  Do you ever do open tunings or do you just do?

• 52:06Speaker 02

  I do both, yeah. But, uh, when I do the slashy indie guitars, it's always six strings and Ronnie and Keith always sort of look at me, but I, but I do it anyway.

• 52:16Conan O'Brien?

  They don't want you on the guitar.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  On every, I don't think so, but, but they've sort of learned to put up with it. Yeah. They've learned to put up with it and you know, I love doing it because. No, it's harder than that, you know. Yeah. It's like this. You know, cause on some of these fast songs, it's like, you know, like hit me in the head and all that. That's it's really slamming, you know, you have to really slam it. Uh, I'm not saying Ronnie Keith don't slam because they do. But when I've written something like that, I, I think I'm, I always wanna be on it, you know? I always wanna be playing guitar on it. So that's why I gave, I mean, I love playing harmonica too. The harmonica thing was great on the Amy Winehouse song because I played the harmonica. The horn parts on Amy original, I played on harmonicas.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Which is a horn part. So I played that on harmonica. That was a good opportunity.

• 53:11Conan O'Brien?

  Do you write exclusively on guitar or do you also sit at the piano and write?

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Piano and guitar.

• 53:16Conan O'Brien?

  Piano and guitar.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Piano guitar. Sometimes I just sing to drum machines, just anything, no instrument, just me singing.

• 53:24Conan O'Brien?

  Do you find that like you've got to do it early in the morning? Cause I know there.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  No, I hate doing things early in the morning. I don't think early in the morning is breakfast and read the newspaper.

• 53:34Conan O'Brien?

  Uh huh.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  And that's it.

• 53:35Conan O'Brien?

  Many people have been asking, is there gonna be a tour for foreign tongues? And I selfishly would want that because I wanna hear these songs live and I know you're gonna get me a ticket.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:47Conan O'Brien?

  You guys are saying probably not right away, but what do you think? Do you think it'd be maybe in a year? Is it possible or it's hard to say?

• 53:55Speaker 02

  It's possible. I, I, I think, I think I'd love to do it too. Cause I think there's a lot of songs on this album. That, that would translate into live really good.

• 54:04Conan O'Brien?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Um, but having said that, you can't really do that many new songs if you do stadium shows. They, the audience is not that accepting, accepting of them. You know, they wanna hear what they're familiar with.

• 54:17Conan O'Brien?

  Can you clock that when you're trying something new and you see people head for the bathroom?

• 54:21Speaker 02

  You can, yeah. You do. You'll get used to it.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  You'll like it. Honestly, you'll like it.

• 54:30Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. But you must have felt that when you were singing some of, I mean, there were many times in your life where you were singing new tracks.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 54:39Conan O'Brien?

  But no one, you know, Led Zeppelin had to play Stairway to the Heaven for the first time at one point on Long Island. And people were like, what is this shit?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. It's always the first time. No, but then, yeah, the more confident you get, the more you just, we're doing it, you know? But there's still a limit to how many you can do out percentage wise.

• 54:58Conan O'Brien?

  So you can see someone headed to the bathroom.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Sometimes I can. I don't concentrate on that.

• 55:05Conan O'Brien?

  I would only concentrate on it. When someone I'm talking and people are heading to the bathroom, it's all I can think about. And it's, they often, that's when they use the bathroom is when I start talking. I heard you talk about David Bowie once. I think it was when we were having dinner and you were talking about David Bowie at one point. And you, you said an interesting thing, which is we were competitive, but we were also good friends. That's a very hard thing to maintain, but I think you did, you guys did that beautifully.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were competitive. David was so competitive. I much more competitive. I was made competitive by David. I mean, I had to be.

• 55:38Conan O'Brien?

  How so?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Well, he was just so competitive that I had to be competitive back, you know? But he, but he would do, I mean, I mean, he, he went through a period, this, David went through all these different.

• 55:52Conan O'Brien?

  Yes.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:53Conan O'Brien?

  Iterations.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Iterations of David. There isn't one David Bowie. There's kind of like a slowly evolving David Bowie. There's, there's jump cuts of, you know, to another David Bowie.

• 56:05Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Another style.

• 56:06Conan O'Brien?

  Then he's the thin white duke.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. When he was doing like Gene Genie.

• 56:10Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  He was very stonely, you know?

• 56:13Conan O'Brien?

  Yes.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  That was very stonely period. And so he would come over and play me Gene Genie, you know? I've got it. Want to listen? I was like, yeah, of course. I said, God, he nicked all my things.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, man. I know. But it's like homage to you.

• 56:30Conan O'Brien?

  It's homage. Yeah, sure.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  It's homage.

• 56:32Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  It's um, but yeah, um, we could, I think John and I were very competitive too. John Lennon, but we're more competitive in being sarcastic.

• 56:44Conan O'Brien?

  Yes.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Verbal competitiveness. Have you ever seen the video of him and Bob Dylan in the back of the limousine?

• 56:51Conan O'Brien?

  I love that. I love that because Bob Dylan is not in good shape. They're in the back of a Rolls Royce, they're driving around London, I think in sixty five. John's got that acid wit where he's saying, come, come, boy, come, come. Do you suffer from scraggly forehead? You know, he's, he's, he turns it into an aspirin ad because Bob Dylan can't pull it together.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  No, that was, that's what, that's very much like John, that, that.

• 57:15Conan O'Brien?

  Did you guys get along?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got, really got along. But I mean, that was John at his most, you know, he's been very sarcastic with Bob, you know, and Bob's not really coming back with the, with the zingy answers.

• 57:28Conan O'Brien?

  No, no, he's impaired and he's, he's, he's not, yeah, he's not.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  That, it does give you a good illustration in, because most of the other things you see of John are, are kind of like short. And that's kind of an extended sarcasm.

• 57:44Conan O'Brien?

  Yes. So that was him all the time?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Not, not all the time.

• 57:48Conan O'Brien?

  He could be sweet.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  He could, of course, he could be lovely.

• 57:51Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  And um, but you know, he's one of these people that if you say something stupid, he'd pick you up, you know.

• 57:58Conan O'Brien?

  We'd see it, right? He'd clock it right away.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Right away, you know. Yeah, but he, he was very competitive about, he wasn't competitive about anything else.

• 58:06Conan O'Brien?

  Hmm. You mean, just, you think he was most competitive about being funny?

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, being funny and sarcastic.

• 58:12Conan O'Brien?

  Yes, more so than music.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's a kind of Liverpool thing, I think.

• 58:16Conan O'Brien?

  Sure.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  I think, maybe I'm stereotyping, but I think it is.

• 58:20Conan O'Brien?

  You've always been, you guys have been great at tour promotion. I don't know what you might do for the next tour. One of the greatest things you ever did was all get on the back of a flatbed truck, drive down Fifth Avenue singing, I believe, Brown Sugar. Yeah, and I'm thinking, that takes nerve to drive through uh, New York in traffic. And, and all the press was told you were going to be in this restaurant. And then they hear music and they come running out of the restaurant with their pads and their cameras. And you guys are on the back of a truck going by.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 58:56Conan O'Brien?

  Which was fantastic.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:58Conan O'Brien?

  Lovely. I don't know if people do things like that anymore.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  They don't really. Um, apparently Charlie told me that was a thing that jazz bands did in New York.

• 59:07Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  To promote their gigs, I think.

• 59:09Conan O'Brien?

  In Harlem, I think. They would get on the back of a truck.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  I think that's where we got it from. Um, I think it might have been Charlie's idea.

• 59:17Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Um, because that was the thing that happened in Harlem.

• 59:20Conan O'Brien?

  And I know, you mentioned Charlie. Charlie's, you use a track of Charlie's, uh, in foreign tongues.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:28Conan O'Brien?

  It's amazing. I know you guys are also readily identifiable by your sounds. It's very hard to do on drums, but you always know it's Charlie.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:39Conan O'Brien?

  It's really incredible.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:40Conan O'Brien?

  I mean, he's got two sticks and a drum kit that, he doesn't have some Keith Moon crazy kit with a thousand. He's got a standard kit. You always know it's him.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and the funny thing is on this track, which is pretty fast rock track. You're almost punk, you might say. And, and everyone says, you know, Charlie's such a sensitive jazz drummer. You know, that was so different about him. Well, not on this track.

• 1:00:03Conan O'Brien?

  No.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  He's banging it.

• 1:00:06Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. The, uh, I have to ask you, Oxfordshire pub, as we record this, I think days ago, you walked into an Oxfordshire pub and started singing to people. How did that happen?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Well, I was.

• 1:00:19Conan O'Brien?

  Were you off your meds? What happened?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I was, didn't know where I was. I had dinner in an Oxford college. I went to an Oxford college. I was invited to a dinner. And, uh, it were interesting people, very pleasant, lots of nice students. And then one of the students that I was talking with said, I play mandolin. I said, oh, that's nice. I said, uh, not the easiest instrument. Uh, it's, I, it's, I play mandolin. I'm, I'm going down the road to play with an Irish band. So do you want to come? So I said, sure. And so I took a couple of people that I was with and the provost of the college. And, and he took his gown off.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  And go into a pub and it was a very small pub, very friendly people. And the band was doing fiddle pieces and the guy joined in with his mandolin. And but no one was singing.

• 1:01:17Conan O'Brien?

  Right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  So I thought, oh, well, here's a here's an opening. We're gonna sing it.

• 1:01:22Conan O'Brien?

  This is my, this is my big chance.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  This is my chance for pub crawling scene. So I did a song that I'd actually recorded and then, but I had to rehearse it just mentally because I hadn't sung it in years and I remember the at least three verses.

• 1:01:36Conan O'Brien?

  It's like an old standard, right?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  It is. Everyone's done it. I think even Bob Dylan's done it, I found out.

• 1:01:42Conan O'Brien?

  Right.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Um, but not that I've heard it. Um, but I had to remember at least three verses in my head before I started. So I didn't just launch into it. Because the worst thing you can do is launch into a song and then you've got one verse.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And that, hmm. So I rehearsed.

• 1:01:57Conan O'Brien?

  I would pay to see that happen with you. I'm sorry, I would just love to see it.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  But it was fine. It was, ah, it's two minutes long, you know, but.

• 1:02:03Conan O'Brien?

  Well, that's, I mean, that keys into, I think, the main point that I wanted to get across in this interview, which is something that, uh, really strikes me in the, in the short time that I've been able to hang out with you, is that you were very much living in the moment, making things in the moment. This album, Foreign Tongues, is of this moment. And you, I mean, sitting at a dinner with you and watching you trying everyone else's food, stealing some of Ronnie's dessert. And I thought, you're, uh, you can converse about anything. Uh, you're, you know, crazily, uh, deeply red and you're just fascinating in all, fascinated

• 1:02:48Conan O'Brien?

  in all kinds of stuff. And I thought, I left my time with you and I thought.

• 1:02:55Conan O'Brien?

  I need, this is my new spirit animal is is Mick Jagger. I want to, I aspire not to be you because that's not gonna happen, but to kind of adopt that philosophy about life, which is uh just bite into it, stay interested.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Conan O'Brien?

  Uh delight yourself.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  I think that's like, you know, I don't think that attitude suits everyone. Because some people, some, well, you know, some of your creativity, if you're a creative person, let's imagine, you will draw on your past. You you might draw on something that you had an idea for when you were twenty five. You might have written a short story when you were in twenty five and you didn't publish it and then you realized that that would make a great film script, or that would make a novel I could now write. Now I'm sixty five. Let's say, let's say. So that's, it's not true that that that you you can't, you you can't draw

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  upon this, this whole well of your pa- past and make it into something. It's, and so you you're not, you you have to be aware of of your past and, but that doesn't mean you live in it. And, you know, you feel, of course, I'm always asked, you know, what happened when you did this and it's so long ago and you and you you find yourself like, just repeating these stories, you know, they're not even true anymore.

• 1:04:26Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  You know, it's just like a, you know, footballer in a pub talking about his goal in nineteen seventy two, you know, it's a, you don't wanna become that. And that's a danger. So, yeah, so everyone says live in the moment, you know, it's just a kind of, like a, like a kind of fashionable mantra. But I mean, to a certain extent, it's true. And I mean, I think also when you're writing like these kind of ephemeral pop songs, which the these, this is what this business is, you you've got to stay in the present day. So so as writing a song like Ringing Hollow, you're you're thinking about.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  The now of what what you're living through now, which of course, you know, you never know could change by the time the record comes out.

• 1:05:14Conan O'Brien?

  Sure.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  But you know, but you can only write that you can't really look into the future. It's hard. So you just write of the writing of the now, you know, and a song like Divine Intervention, you're writing of the now, uh, of what your feelings are. You know, so there's, there's a, there's a thing that runs through these lyrics of these songs that is definitely of the now and the kind of weird period. And we're kind of like, it's, it's difficult for some people living in this period.

• 1:05:42Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  And, and, um, and, and you know, there's possibly dangers that, you know, that, that we're all in in some way or other, but we're geopolitical dangers or economic dangers, um, and who knows what else? And, and we're all a bit, we're a bit, a little bit, um, sensitive to them. I think people are sensitive to the, to these things. And so when I'm writing this stuff, you know, I can't help myself, but I'm not, I'm not setting out to even write. It just comes out.

• 1:06:15Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah. It's what's happening right now. And, uh, these are scary times, but I have to thank you because you've given me, you and the other lads have given me an enormous amount of joy in my life.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm glad.

• 1:06:29Conan O'Brien?

  I.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  That's what we're here for.

• 1:06:31Conan O'Brien?

  Before I became a bad guitarist, I was a bad drummer. And when I was a kid, I would set up uh, my drum kit in the living room and put on Stones records and try and do what Charlie was doing. And my parents let me do that. And we had neighbors, they were lovely.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Conan O'Brien?

  I can't believe, I would not let my kids do that. I would, I would smash the kit. But you've given me a enormous joy. Um, lovely getting to know you, uh, and talk to you. And you're one of my favorite conversations. I've been talking to people nonstop for 32 years and you're one of my favorite people to talk to.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  I hope the conversation today, we, we covered a few of the.

• 1:07:09Conan O'Brien?

  We got, we got so much.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  We didn't talk about your hillbilly guitar playing much and your guitar collection.

• 1:07:14Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  You may have mentioned that on these.

• 1:07:16Conan O'Brien?

  I think we

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Podcast before.

• 1:07:17Conan O'Brien?

  No, we, we, uh, we talked about it at dinner.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  You did.

• 1:07:21Conan O'Brien?

  And we got into my fascination with rockabilly.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:24Conan O'Brien?

  And, um, wanting to sing and, and funny Keith heard me do Ronnie Hawkins, a version of Ronnie Hawkins, 40 days where I do it twice as fast as Ronnie Hawkins. And Keith said, you sound like a fucking auctioneer.

• 1:07:41Conan O'Brien?

  Like, but, um, yeah, this is one of the joys of my life and I'm so delighted that we were able to get together today.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:07:50Conan O'Brien?

  And foreign tongues, uh, please, when you get a moment, tour with this.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  I try.

• 1:07:56Conan O'Brien?

  Because I really want to hear the songs live.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:08:00Conan O'Brien?

  All right.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  I want to do it.

• 1:08:01Conan O'Brien?

  I salute you.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. Nice to talk to you.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend with Conan O'Brien, Sonam Afssessian and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gorley. Executive produced by Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross and Nick Leo. Theme song by The White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Brendan Burns. Additional production support by Mars Melnick. Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Batista and Britt Kahn. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts and you might find your review read on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 669-587-2847 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. You can also get three free months of Sirius XM when you sign up at siriusxm.com/conan. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.

• 1:09:15Conan O'Brien?

  Technology can generate salary recommendations in seconds, but building an offer that lands skilled talent, that takes more than just an estimate you came up with.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right.

• 1:09:25Conan O'Brien?

  That's where Robert Half's new 2027 Salary Guide can help.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

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• 1:09:29Conan O'Brien?

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• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  No, but maybe-

• 1:09:32Conan O'Brien?

  For several years, I just gave you groceries, remember?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  I know, yeah, I remember that. That was not good.

• 1:09:37Conan O'Brien?

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• 1:09:59Conan O'Brien?

  When you hear Alka-Seltzer, you probably think heartburn, right?

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:10:02Conan O'Brien?

  Well, did you know Alka-Seltzer has a line of cold and flu medications known as Alka-Seltzer Cold? Did you know that, David?

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  No, but I feel like we need it.

• 1:10:10Conan O'Brien?

  Why didn't you know that, David?

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  I know, you expect me to know everything.

• 1:10:13Conan O'Brien?

  I knew this because I've-

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Did you?

• 1:10:15Conan O'Brien?

  Yeah, I've tried it, it's really good. And I like that fizzy, fizzy, fizzy when you drop the Alka-Seltzer Cold into the water. Alka-Seltzer Cold Fast Dissolves Tablets are designed to deliver cold and flu relief fast. Just drop the two tablets in water and hear those bubbles bursting into action, ready to work faster than pills. Bubbles faster than pills. Pills take time to dissolve, not bubbles. Next time a cold or flu strikes, quick! Alka-Seltzer Cold: Nothing works faster for cold and flu symptom relief. Among oral products used as directed.