Sarasota-Born Naarai Jacobs Backs Up Mick Jagger on New Rolling Stones Album
Image: Courtesy Photo
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger may have sold his home here in the Lake Club, but he still has a link to the Sarasota area: Sarasota-born and raised Naarai Jacobs sang backup for him on the Stones' newest album, Foreign Tongues, just released this month.
Jacobs, the daughter of Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe founder and artistic director Nate Jacobs, got the call to join the recording session one late night at home in Los Angeles, where she’s lived for the past decade or so. “I got a DM,” Jacobs says. (We spoke with her while she was in Tampa, on tour with Canadian R&B singer-songwriter Daniel Caesar.) “They asked if I was the girl from ‘Finish Line,’ which was a song I did a few years ago with Elton John and Stevie Wonder. I said yes, and they gave me a number to call. It was Andrew Watt [the Stones’ album producer.] We’d known each other before, but hadn’t spoken in four years. He said, ‘I’ve been looking for you’” to come to the recording studio and work on Foreign Tongues.
Jacobs says that was in August of 2025, and a couple weeks later, she was in the studio, backing up Jagger’s vocals on the song “Mr. Charm,” which takes a sarcastic look at billionaires (like “mad mogul Mr. Musk”) who are unable to form real intimacies with anyone, instead just intent on making and spending money. She also sang with a longtime friend, Porcha Clay, on the track “Back in Your Life.”
Was Jacobs nervous about meeting Jagger? Sure, but, she says, “Andrew and Mick were very clear about what they wanted, and that makes my job easier. I can color within the lines. Sometimes, I’m creating my part, or doing a bunch of ad libs and the producers keep what they want. But this was a pretty quick session in the studio. We did ‘Mr. Charm,’ first, with Andrew and Mick in the control room giving me notes. They wanted me to mimic Mick’s inflections, so that was pretty easy. That took maybe 25 or 30 minutes. Then after a break, we did ‘Back in Your Life’ in another 20 or 30. Altogether, I was in the studio maybe 2 ½ hours. Mick was very gracious, generous and kind. He doesn’t take up all the oxygen in the room. He took my nerves away by being warm and kind and focused on the work.”
Of course, Jagger isn’t the first superstar Jacobs has worked with. Besides the John-Wonder recording, she’s sung a number of times with Beyoncé. That came about when her godbrother, Sarasota’s EJ Porter, sent her an audition notice that at first Jacobs thought sounded pretty sketchy.
“To be honest, I thought it was bull,” she says with a laugh. “You know, I’ve been there before; you show up for some stuff, and find yourself asking ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ But Daddy said, ‘Just audition, because we don’t know what it could be.’ The casting director who had reached out to EJ had worked with Beyoncé on the Super Bowl show, so I went to an in-person audition and found out who and what it was for.”
That led to her joining Beyoncé at Coachella in 2018, “the most surreal thing ever,” Jacobs says, “to be there on stage with the greatest entertainer I’ve seen. That performance became an album, and then I did two other albums with her. That just kicked the door open for me,” leading to stints with Kanye West and Tori Kelly.
Image: Sorcha Augustine
Jacob’s success as a singer is all the more amazing because, growing up and performing in local shows, like WBTT’s Black Nativity, The Wiz, Little Shop of Horrors and more, her focus was on acting, not vocalizing. In fact, when she attended Howard University, she majored in acting. But when she had to sing in order to do a concert recital there, two other students in an a capella group submitted her name for an open mic night list. And from there, the path led to more singing, Los Angeles and now, to her own songwriting.
In fact, that’s what she intends to focus on once her current tour with Caesar ends in September. While she’s done an EP and a single in the past, the upcoming recording session of her own songs will, she says, “be my next big project.” Unless, maybe, she gets another call from a rock music legend and his producer. In the meantime, you can also sometimes catch Jacobs on TV’s The Voice, where she fills in as a substitute singer when needed.
“Every part of my career, it was never planned,” Jacobs says. “But it all kind of feeds into the next opportunity. I don’t get too far ahead of it.”
