Founding Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman will turn 79 this October, but despite his advancing age, he’s still making new music.  Next month, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer will release his first solo album in 33 years,Back to Basics.

Wyman admits that he initially wondered if he might be “too old” to put out a new album, but quickly thought the better of it.

“I thought, ‘Every creative artist goes until they drop,'” he tells Rolling Stone.  “Whether they’re sculptors, writers, poets or musicians, they just carry on as long as they can.  So then I thought, ‘What the hell.'”

Wyman was inspired to make the record after rediscovering some forgotten demos of songs he felt never got their due.  He decided to revisit those tunes, as well as some other old songs that hadn’t made it onto his earlier solo albums, and record updated versions of them.

Bill explains to Rolling Stone that he used the stripped-down sounds of a number of acclaimed songwriters as inspiration for the album.

“I wanted it to be inspired a bit like After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, to capture the simplicity of those couple of albums he did around that time,” he points out.  “I was also inspired by J.J. Cale, who I had done stuff with inThe Rhythm Kings, and Tom Waits and the way he sings.”

Wyman adds that another influence on the new album was 80-yar-old Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, describing his 1984 tune “Dance Me to the End of Love” as “wonderful.”

Back to Basics also features a number of brand-new compositions that Wyman says he wrote “in my house on a little acoustic guitar.”  He notes that since he’s not a guitar player, “I usually just mess about on the bottom strings for little guitar licks and riffs.”

Meanwhile, Bill says he has no interest in ever reuniting with The Rolling Stones again.

“You can’t go back and relive something and have it be the same,” he insists, while pointing out that he’s “still great mates” with his former band mates.

“We still send each other Christmas and birthday presents as we always did,” Wyman reveals, “and sometimes I do gigs with Charlie [Watts] and his band or with Ronnie Wood if he’s doing a special.”

Bill says he “loved every minute” of his 31 years in the band, and is “proud of everything we did,” but was very ready to retire from The Stones after the three major tours they mounted in 1989 and ’90.

“I thought, ‘That’s enough for me, there’s nowhere else to go,'” he recalls.  “I was happy to move on because there were so many other things that I wanted to do in my life that I had planned to years and years and years before, never expecting as anyone did that the band would last that long.”

Back to Basics will hit stores in the U.K. on June 22.  No U.S. release has been announced yet.

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