Mick Jagger is a Rolling Stone who’s gathering no moss. The 77-year-old rocker just wrote and recorded a new pandemic-themed song, “Eazy Sleazy,” and he recruited no less than Dave Grohl to help him do so. The song basically slams anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories.
“Shooting the vaccine/Bill Gates is in my bloodstream/It’s mind control,” go the lyrics. “The Earth is flat and cold/It’s never warming up/The arctics turned to slush/The second coming’s late/There’s aliens in the deep state.” Later, however, he sounds a bit more upbeat: “Everything’s gonna get really freaky,” Jagger sings. “It’s gonna be a garden of earthly delights.” He also cites such common quarantine realities as “pacing in the yard, “cancel all the tours,” “football’s fake applause,” “virtual tours,” and “that’s a pretty mask.” The Rolling Stones’ frontman is no stranger to one-off, politically pointed solo songs. In 2017, he released “England Lost” and “Gotta Get a Grip.” The new song, he told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview, is a reflection on the past year, a look at the physical and mental strains put on a society contending with Covid-19. “We’ve been doing this and going through different emotions through it and having false starts and stops and openings and closings,” Jagger told the magazine. “End of last summer, everything seemed to be going well and people were out and about and great and then, especially in Europe, everything’s shut down again and you haven’t had any kind of social interaction. It’s a long time for people to have to endure that. [Also] the deep psychological ramifications of it on people and children not going to school and not socializing. We don’t know what they’re really going to be [long-term].”The lyrics, Jagger noted, came to him fast in March, and he knew time was of the essence. Wait too long, and the song might be out of date. He recorded a demo and fired it off to Grohl. Over the course of a month, Jagger (vocals and guitar) and Grohl (drums, guitar, and bass) exchanged their portions of the song, with producer Matt Clifford melding it into a cohesive whole. “I said, ‘I’d love to do it with someone really great and is working from home,’” Jagger recalled. “I knew Dave and [Foo Fighters] just put out an album, so I knew he got that out of the way. I phoned Dave up and said, ‘Dave, would you be interested?’ He said [puts on American accent], ‘Yeah, I’m really bored!’ ‘You just put an album out.’ ‘I’m really bored! I want to do it. I want to work!’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll send you the song.’ It was all done quite quickly. Dave likes it ’cause it rocks hard. I like to rock hard, too, so it feels good in that way.”Grohl clearly likes collaborating with his rock n roll heroes. The Nirvana/Foo Fighters singer/drummer/guitarist has performed and/or recorded with Paul McCartney, John Doe, Brian May, Norah Jones, Lemmy, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, Zac Brown, and John Paul Jones, among others. “It’s hard to put into words what recording this song with Sir Mick means to me,” Grohl told Rolling Stone. “It’s beyond a dream come true.”