A wandering spirit is what Mick Jagger was when his solo career was all he had. He seemed like a lost soul, desperately trying and failing to stick to what was popular at the times. It was his undoing as an artist away from The Rolling Stones, a group he had tried and failed to keep in with the synth revolution and wham-like pop impact of the time. It was never going to work and Wandering Spirit, hits on a few years after the bubble had burst. He still tries for the buff, pop-rock angle. Iggy Pop but without the instrumentals or the confidence necessary to pose well when shirtless. Wandering Spirit, where Jagger poses like a patient waiting for results from a doctor, feels very sterile and washed of the filth Jagger had been making good on with The Stones after their reunion. It is his loss, nobody else’s.
From the count which opens Wired All Night to the clunky finale on closer Handsome Molly, Jagger fails to capitalise on the pop rock noise he was so desperate to be part of, instead fumbling the everyday tones and shapes of the late-stage 1980s sound. He is five years too late. At least with Keith Richards the blues rock never died and has aged rather well in places. This is not the case for Wandering Spirit, which feels thoroughly trapped in time. Fret nonsense on most of the tracks, egregiously so on opening track Wired All Night. Jagger is a man who has written with personable depth, with towering understandings of the world around him and how he gels with it, or in his best moments, against it. Trying to follow on the jumped-up pop nature solely to throw himself around on stage to some noise with a suitable tempo can surely be done better than pouring what little he does into Wandering Spirit.
Drum machine disasters and a traipse through what Michael Jackson and Prince had accomplished a decade before on Sweet Thing highlights just how disastrous the instrumental moments can be for Wandering Spirit. A shame to waste such strong vocal talents but at least Jagger still sounds as strong in his range as he does on this solo car crash. Empty, hollow pieces like Out of Focus and Don’t Tear Me Up try and hit at the wonders of life and the shortcomings of it when lacking in love, but these are such primitive and fragile examples of Jagger as a lyricist. A complete and utter breakdown of even the most basic material proves completely futile and it weakens an already dull album. From Put Me in the Trash onwards, Jagger may as well get his wish for all the forgettable dreck found afterwards.
From the jagged guns of Mother of a Man to the despicable, dated Think. Gluttony on the title track does very little to help Jagger, whose writing style here is just a collection of thoughtless, backing vocal-reliant, dull percussion numbers. It feels like the religious euphoria of the religious trilogy Bob Dylan put out a decade before but without the heartfelt attempts at connecting with some higher power. He rips the instrumental depths though, watering them down with a collection of underwhelming and performative, plain guitar solos and enough tempo changes to make his hip-thrusting stage antics work on all occasions. Thankfully, The Stones were back in full swing by this point and solo efforts from Jagger would slow to a welcome crawl. Closer Handsome Molly is the dated icing on the sogging cake. A poor man’s excuse for a wide berth of uninteresting pop noise nonsense. The whole album is.
