The Rolling Stones – Mr Charm

Mick Jagger brought in the riff, Keith Richards wrote a better one, and the song half the music press announced in April turned out to be the Stones’ third single in October.

The congas Steve Winwood carried into the Foreign Tongues sessions came with a history. Jimmy Miller, the producer behind the Rolling Stones’ run of late-1960s and early-1970s albums, had given them to Winwood, and producer Andrew Watt remembers the organist turning up with them while the band worked on Mr Charm. It was a fitting prop for a song built almost entirely on rhythm. Walking through the track with Watt for Variety’s Behind the Song series, Mick Jagger described his vocal as closer to rap than to melody: a stream of words that has to land exactly on the drums. Six decades into their career, the Stones had made a record driven by percussion and talk.

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It began as a Jagger demo: a guitar riff and a rough melody. Then Keith Richards heard it. Richards came up with a stronger riff, which now leads the song, and a bassline that Watt says turned the demo into something else; Darryl Jones plays it on the record. Jagger’s original figure survives underneath. “He made it so much better,” Jagger told Variety, adding with a laugh that improving things is Keith’s job. Watt points out that in the chorus Ronnie Wood sits in the left channel and Richards in the right, with Jagger in the middle. The lick the two guitarists trade back and forth is the one Jagger brought in.

The rhythm section carries the rest. Jagger singled out Steve Jordan’s groove for praise and tied the whole song to dance: the drums, the feet, and a lyric delivered so fast that every word has to sit in time. He has carried that idea since the band’s first tours. In the Variety session he grabbed Watt’s arms to demonstrate how Bo Diddley’s percussionist, on one of those early Stones tours, taught him to play maracas properly. On Mr Charm Jagger is still credited with percussion, alongside lead vocal and electric guitar.

A charmer with nothing to sell

Under all that motion sits the most pointed lyric on the album. Wood has described the song as the band’s commentary on the dangerous state of the world, and the lyric asks the listener whom they would really trust, naming Boeing, NASA and Elon Musk as candidates. Wood framed the balance the Stones were after as keeping people smiling while being honest with them about what is wrong. Dave Simpson of The Guardian picked out the song’s swipe at Musk as evidence that Foreign Tongues is a modern-sounding and occasionally political record rather than a nostalgia act.

The song had made headlines before anyone heard it. In early April, several outlets reported that a track called Mr Charm would be the lead single for a new Stones album on April 11. That slot went instead to Rough and Twisted, released on 1,000 vinyl copies under the band’s old pseudonym, The Cockroaches. Foreign Tongues arrived on July 10, 2026. It entered the UK chart at No.1, the band’s 15th British chart-topping album, tying the Beatles for second place behind Robbie Williams, and reached No.7 on the Billboard 200. Polydor finally issued Mr Charm as the album’s third single on October 1, 2026, backed with Bad Luck Hideaway, a Jagger–Richards duet with Charlie Watts on drums.

The official video arrived the same day. Henry Scholfield directed it in Palmdale, California, with Alexander Skarsgård in the lead, following the actors the band cast for the album’s earlier clips: Odessa A’zion for In the Stars, and Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton for Jealous Lover. The song the rumor mill announced first became the single the band released last, and it may be the album’s clearest statement of how the Stones still work. Jagger starts something, Richards rebuilds it, and the groove underneath comes from a percussion lesson Jagger got on the road more than sixty years ago.