Mick Jagger admitted that the Rolling Stones were “lazy” in the past, citing the example of the lost tracks added to the recent re-release of their 1973 album Goats Head Soup. He also said he was prone to say whatever felt right during interviews tied to record releases.

The veteran singer recently revealed that he’d been against the idea of resurrecting the three unreleased songs, because he assumed they were abandoned because they weren’t good enough. He later changed his mind.

“They said to me, ‘Well there’s unreleased tracks there,’” Jagger told Rolling Stone in a new interview. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no.’ Unreleased tracks to me, that always means a lot of work. It’s like, ‘Things that you didn’t like and didn’t finish!’ I’ve got a bit of a negative thing about them. But then you start listening to them and going, ‘Well, actually, it’s not bad at all. I don’t know why we didn’t finish it.’ We were just being lazy, you know.”

At the time of Goats Head Soup’s original release, Jagger said he preferred it to the Stones' previous album Exile on Main St. – an opinion he seemed not to agree with later. “I say stupid things like that when I’m promoting albums,” he explained. “You gotta take that with a pinch of salt. ‘Course it’s better! This album, if you liked Exile, this is even better!’ I can imagine myself saying that.”

He recalled thinking “Angie” was going to be a hit as they worked to include it on Goats Head Soup. “I mean, you never know, but you get this feeling: ‘Well, if there’s gonna be a hit on this album, that’s going to be the one,'" he said. "And it was very successful, and it’s still in our stage repertoire.”

Reminded that Bob Dylan once said it was one of his favorite Rolling Stones songs, Jagger responded, “I’d love to hear Bob do that sometime. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

 

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