The Wild Nine-Month Journey that Led to Nathaniel Mary Quinn Designing the Rolling Stones’ New Album Cover

Nathaniel Mary Quinn still sounds a little stunned by the whole affair: Last fall, the painter was in the kitchen of his Brooklyn brownstone when he got on a three-way call with Mick Jagger and producer Andrew Watt. By the end of it, he had agreed to make the cover art for Foreign Tongues, the Rolling Stones’ new album, due out July 10. 

“I’m standing in my kitchen talking to Mick Jagger,” Quinn told me last week over the phone, “It was surreal.”

The resulting image, an unsettling but magnetic composite portrait that folds together the faces of Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood, now sits at the center of the Stones’ global rollout for the record. Quinn also redesigned the band’s famous tongue-and-lips logo for the campaign.

The story started after Quinn’s solo exhibition “Echoes from Copeland” at Gagosian in Chelsea last September. According to Quinn, Jagger visited the show twice. A few weeks later, Quinn’s wife and studio manager, Donna Augustine Quinn, received a text from music executive Jimmy Iovine saying the Stones were looking for someone to make the new album cover. Soon after, producer Andrew Watt, who worked on both Hackney Diamonds and the new album, Foreign Tongues, reached out as well. Then came the phone call with Jagger.

“My first vision was to create an amalgamation of all of your faces into one flesh,” Quinn said he told the singer. Jagger immediately replied: “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

The band played Quinn three unreleased tracks from the album during that first conversation to help inspire the work. “They felt that if I could hear some of the music, maybe it could generate ideas,” Quinn said. “And it did.”

Over the next nine months, Quinn stayed in regular contact with Jagger and Richards, speaking with them roughly every two weeks while developing the image. He studied photographs of the band members closely for the composite painting, pulling from Richards’s trademark headband, Wood’s hair and nose, and, naturally, Jagger’s lips.

At one point, Richards invited Quinn to a private rehearsal session in Lower Manhattan. Quinn brought along a close friend, then spent the evening watching Richards jam with local musicians before sitting down with the guitarist between sets to hear stories about the Stones’ early years.

“He’s just a lovely, down-to-earth human being,” Quinn said of Richards. “It’s all about the music with him.”

A few weeks later, Quinn met Jagger for lunch at the Baccarat Hotel across from the Museum of Modern Art. Over coffee, the pair discussed family, London, race, and the Black American musicians who inspired the Stones.

“All of our music is influenced by Black American music,” Quinn recalled Jagger telling him. “We studied those musicians. We wanted to be like them.”

Not every part of the process was straightforward. Quinn said Jagger initially worried that the first painting looked “a little scary” and asked him to produce a second option which wound up featuring the three band members getting out of a vintage sports car. Quinn finished the second picture, but in the end the band unanimously chose the original composite portrait.

The artist still owns both paintings, and, more importantly, retains the copyright.

The whole arragement required months of negotiations between Quinn’s representatives and the Stones’ legal team over licensing and usage rights. Quinn credited his wife with making sure the artist retained ownership while allowing the band to use the image for the album campaign.

Things escalated quickly once the rollout began. Elton John, who already owned Quinn’s work, FaceTimed him after seeing the cover reveal. “You’ve made album covers cool again!” he said.

Then came the launch event in Williamsburg, where Conan O’Brien interviewed Jagger, Richards, and Wood onstage beneath Quinn’s artwork and redesigned tongue logo. Before the event started, Quinn said Leonardo DiCaprio walked up to him and jokingly claimed credit for the entire collaboration.

“Don’t believe anybody else,” Quinn recalled the actor saying. “I’m the guy who told Mick Jagger you should do the cover.”

During the event, O’Brien asked Quinn about the painting directly, prompting Jagger to publicly praise the artist from the stage. For Quinn, the moment still feels difficult to process. “Man,” he said, “Mick Jagger gave me a tribute in front of all those people. It was amazing.”