Paul McCartney’s recent collaboration with The Rolling Stones on their new album, Foreign Tongues, has been hailed as a major crossover event, thanks to the historical rivalry between the band and The Beatles during the 1960s, when both iconic rock groups co-existed.<\/p>\n
As die-hard fans of the Beatles and the Stones will know, however, this is far from the first time the two musical competitors have collaborated on a song. McCartney and his songwriting partner, John Lennon, allowed the Stones to record their song “I Wanna Be Your Man” before the Beatles did for their 1964 album “Meet the Beatles. Not only that,<\/p>\n
Not only that \u2014 McCartney, who plays bass guitar on the 2026 song “Covered in You,” first appeared on a Stones track just shy of 60 years ago, along with fellow Beatles Lennon and George Harrison.<\/p>\n
“We Love You,” the 1967 single that was written when the group was working on the album Their Satanic Majesties Request, was composed shortly after the band’s respective vocalist and lead guitarist, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, were arrested at Richards’ home in Sussex for drug possession in February of that year.<\/p>\n
Jagger and Richards, who serve as the primary co-writers of the band, believe the raid of Richards’ home and their subsequent arrest were a direct result of a long-standing media smear campaign about popular rock musicians’ drug use. By the time of their arrest, Jagger was already pursuing a lawsuit against The News of the World regarding their reporting on alleged drug use.<\/p>\n
This suspicion couldn’t be written off as mere paranoia, as before their own arrests, another prolific British rock musician, Donovan, was subject to a raid shortly after a TV documentary<\/a> that speculated about his drug use aired. Although unbeknownst to them at the time of recording “We Love You” in August 1967, Lennon and Harrison, who had their own extensive press and public interest regarding their drug use, would face raids and subsequent arrestes in 1968 and 1969, respectively.<\/p>\n During the sessions for the song, one of which was held at McCartney’s house, with visits from Lennon, along with poet and prominent drug advocate Allen Ginsberg, it was agreed that Lennon and McCartney (along with Harrison, although sources vary) would contribute backing vocals on the psychedelic rock song’s overdubbing. The track’s foundational use of the mellotron, as played by Brian Jones, previously and mostly famously used on the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” made the arrangement feel like a true collaboration between the groups.<\/p>\n “That’s jail to me. We were on bail. We thought we were going to go to jail, basically. It was kind of like a last fling before the jail doors started slamming,” Richards told Uncut <\/a>about the recording of “We Love You” in July 2026.<\/p>\n The song’s lyrics have long been interpreted as a final message to the public, who had been supportive of the Stones’ stratospheric career at the birth of popular rock and roll, before the key would be thrown away once its members were imprisoned. With lyrics like, “We don’t care if you hound we\/And love’s that all surround we\/Love can’t get our minds off\/We love you, we love you,” there’s a sharp divide between the “we” of the Stones and the “you” of the public, where the group promises the relationship will remain unchanged.<\/p>\n “We thought, ‘Well, you know, we won’t be doing this for a while.’ That was a really low point because we figured they’d really nailed us. And that was kinda going to be our last tune for a while.”<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Men’s Journal<\/a> on Jul 26, 2026, where it first appeared in the News<\/a> section. Add Men’s Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul McCartney’s recent collaboration with The Rolling Stones on their new album, Foreign Tongues, has been hailed as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":827208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[288994,49,48,75,29320,9997,99270,288995,341,9998,9999,20534],"class_list":["post-827207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-beatles-lennon","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-george-harrison","tag-john-lennon","tag-lennon-and-mccartney","tag-mick-jagger-and-keith-richards","tag-music","tag-paul-mccartney","tag-the-beatles","tag-the-rolling-stones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/827208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}