Mick Jagger's SuperHeavy: A supergroup like no other

Mick Jagger's SuperHeavy: A supergroup like no other

By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY

Five disparate stars from seemingly incompatible genres convene to make an album on the fly without a blueprint. What could

possibly go wrong besides ego clashes, artistic gridlock, fruitless exertion and humiliating failure?

SuperHeavy, an intercontinental supergroup formed by longtime pals Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart, managed to dodge those traps and emerge with an impressive self-titled debut, out today. File it under — well, there's no established classification for the band's crazy quilt of rock, soul, reggae, blues, pop and Indian music.

"It doesn't fit a particular genre, even individual songs, nevermind the whole album," says Jagger, 68. "It wasn't our goal to surprise people. We did this to have fun and be creative. When I think

about it, it is rather surprising, and in music, that's a good thing.

"Much as we love buying an album of rap tunes with this guest and that guest, we know it's all rap. This record goes in other areas."

Slim and dapper in a gray jacket, slacks, sneakers and piano-patterned socks, the Rolling Stones singer is waiting in his hotel suite to be whisked to the video shoot for widely praised first single Miracle Worker, a rootsy, soulful reggae-pop tune with a fiddle twang.

It's one of a dozen tracks pared from 35 hours of spontaneous jamming in early 2009 at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles, where British soul diva Joss Stone,

reggae singer Damian Marley and Indian film composer A.R. Rahman joined co-producers Jagger and Stewart.

"We all sort of chipped in our bits," Jagger says of the unorthodox process, adding dryly, "It was very, very interesting. I never worked with Dave where we haven't written songs first. I asked him, 'Why are we going to sessions with no songs? It's really dangerous.' There was nothing to lose apart from some studio time that we were willing to gamble.

"It was full-on creativity in the moment. That was the fun thing, thinking on the spot. After a few days, we got a good idea of how everyone functioned. It was a creative bonanza for like 10 days."

The resulting 29 compositions, some of them an hour-plus, served as the source material. Fine-tuning continued sporadically around the globe: off the coast of Cyprus, in France, Turkey, Miami, the Caribbean and India.

'Melting pot came to mind'

"It's been a crazy trip," says Stewart, 59, studying SuperHeavy's Shepard Fairey cover artwork on a desk at his Weapons of Mass Entertainment headquarters in Hollywood. The Eurythmics founder conjured his "mad, alchemist-type experiment" while listening to musical crosscurrents blasting from big sound systems in various villages miles from his hillside home in Saint Ann, Jamaica.

"It all started to merge," he says. "It sounded like Indian music laying on top of reggae, and it was bluesy. A melting pot came to mind, and I thought it would make an amazing fusion."
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