Will The Rolling Stones Win a Grammy for ‘Foreign Tongues’?

The Rolling Stones have been known as the world’s greatest rock and roll band for six decades, but Grammy voters were shamefully late in getting on board. The Stones weren’t nominated in any category until the 1979 ceremony, when Some Girls was up for album of the year.

How can that be? How could such classic albums as Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. have been completely ignored – not to mention such landmark singles as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Honky Tonk Women” and “Brown Sugar”?

One reason is that Grammy voters in the ’60s and ’70s were resistant to rock, favoring pop and what we now call traditional pop. (In more recent years, Grammy voters were slow to embrace hip-hop. Resistance to the new and different is often a byproduct of institutional voting.)

The Beatles were nominated for album of the year a record five years in a row from 1966-70, but they were more in line with Grammy tastes. They were more often than The Stones to be found on the pop side of pop/rock.

Another reason The Stones were left out for so long was the Grammys didn’t have performance categories dedicated to rock until 1980. Rock bands had to compete for best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus. (From 1975-79, the category description noted “This category is for pop, rock and folk.”) Moreover, the Grammys didn’t have a best rock album category until 1995. (Fittingly, The Stones were the first winner of the latter award.)

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The Academy has attempted to make it up to the Stones for being so slow to recognize them. They received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 1986. They were just the third rock act to receive that honor, following Elvis Presley in 1971 and Chuck Berry in 1984. They were the first group or duo from any genre to receive it. (Note: The Beatles had received a different award, the trustees award, in 1972. The Fab Four finally received a lifetime achievement award in 2014, on the 50th anniversary of their U.S. breakthrough.)

The Stones didn’t come to the ceremony in Los Angeles to pick up their lifetime achievement award (who could blame them?) but accepted it via satellite from the Roof Garden Club in London. Mick Jagger was appropriately irreverent in his remarks: “I’d like to say thank you to all the people that have stuck by this band through thick and thin. And to all the people that took the piss, the joke’s on you.”

Seven Stones recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame – three classic singles (“I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Paint It Black” and “Honky Tonk Women”) and four albums (Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St.). The Grammy Hall of Fame, which dates to 1974, sometimes functions as a second chance for the Grammys to honor recordings they missed the first time around.

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Since Grammy voters belatedly discovered The Stones, the band has fared pretty well in the nominations. Their last two studio albums each won a Grammy. Blue & Lonesome won best traditional blues album in 2018; Hackney Diamonds won best rock album in 2025. Their three studio albums before Blue & Lonesome were each nominated for best rock album.

The band’s new album Foreign Tongues, which was produced by Andrew Watt, has an excellent chance of landing a best rock album nod. The 2027 nominations will be announced on Nov. 16. The awards will be presented on Feb. 7, 2027.

Watt (profiled here) has his own following in Grammyland – he won producer of the year, non-classical in 2021 and has since won four more Grammys – best rock album for Ozzy Osbourne’s Patient Number 9 and Hackney Diamonds; best pop vocal album for Lady Gaga’s Mayhem; and best dance pop recording for Gaga’s “Abracadabra.” Fun Fact: Watt, who is just 35, wasn’t even born when The Stones’ Steel Wheels album was released in 1989.

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Jagger made his live performance on the Grammy stage on Feb. 13, 2011, at the 53rd annual Grammy Awards. He sang “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” (which The Stones had covered on The Rolling Stones, Now! in 1965) as a tribute to soul singer Solomon Burke, who had died the previous October. Jagger was backed by Raphael Saadiq and his band.

Look and see how The Stones have fared in the Grammy nominations since 1979, the year Grammy voters first invited them to the party. The year shown is the year of the Grammy ceremony.