Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones’ Final Bow: “Maybe I Have”

With a new album just arrived and his 83rd birthday two weeks away, Mick Jagger is weighing what “the end” could mean for the Rolling Stones. In an interview with the New York Times, timed to the release of the band’s 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, Jagger fielded the question directly: will he know when he’s walked off stage for the last time?

“Maybe I have,” he said. “I could get run over by a bus outside of my house. You never really know, do you? You don’t know what’s going to happen to you in life. But I personally hope to be able to tour. I like going places. I like meeting people.”

The remark lands less as a retirement tease than as philosophical real talk from a performer who has spent six decades fronting one of rock’s most enduring institutions. Jagger admitted that such a career has a psychological cost: “It does affect you. You can become disassociated from other people. You get disassociated from what people might call ‘real life.’” He spoke of a “permanently damaged” psychological state common to those who build entire identities around performance, especially in their late 20s and early 30s. “It’s a big ego trip, and you have to have a huge ego to do this.”

Physical decline is no abstraction either. “There’s nothing good about it,” Jagger said of aging. “You can’t do things as quickly as you want to. Physically you’ve got to be more careful. You know, when you’re playing football, they put you in goal a lot. I’m not very good at it!”

The conversation also touched on his frustration during the years when the Stones produced almost no new music—a silence broken first by 2023’s Hackney Diamonds and now Foreign Tongues, which includes the track “Jealous Lover,” referencing Plato. “My interest in philosophy is superficial,” Jagger said, “but I find it a hard subject to educate myself into.” For a man still weighing his own final scene, such candour feels anything but superficial.