Keith Richards explains the secrets of songwriting
The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards is nothing short of an enigma. A musician that has repeatedly espoused such a degree of iconoclasm that he has always been regarded as an outlier, removed from his bandmates and peers.
Ostensibly, Richards is rock music’s ultimate hellraiser, the cat with nine lives, a plucky individual who has consistently managed to escape brushes with death and the law. The Dartford native is perhaps the most storied living musician, with his exploits the stuff of legend, and his memoir, Life, remains one of the most revealing a figure of his status has released.
Although he is famous for his extra-musical antics, such as supposedly snorting his father’s ashes, Richards’ status is not unfounded. Primarily, he has reached this lofty status by being a stellar musician. He is a guitar hero, a master of the blues and the alternate tuning, and without him, The Rolling Stones would not be the world-conquering leviathan they have been for six decades. From ‘You Got the Silver’ to ‘Connection’, Richards has written some of the band’s best songs and delivered many iconic riffs to boot.
Arguably, Richards’ most famous riff is ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, but he’s also cooked up the legendary motifs of ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Start Me Up’, to name just three. Richards’ work speaks for itself; duly, he is regarded as one of the greatest to have ever picked up the six-string and one of the definitive masters of the riff.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2020, he discussed his approach to songwriting and the secret to a great track. He explained that there are no constraints when crafting pieces, and in his usual style, he said that the existing rules are to be broken. The guitarist said: “When you’re writing songs, there are no fucking rules. In fact, you’re looking to break them. You’re looking to sort of find the next missing chord. You’re looking to find the next best way to express things. Writing songs is not about the lyrics one side and music on another.”
He continued: “It’s about the two coming together. And you can be a great poet and you might write some lovely music, but the art and the beauty of writing songs is to pull those two together, where they seem to love each other, and that’s writing songs”.
Coveting spontaneity, Richards discussed how he believes that a great riff appears in the spur-of-the-moment. He continued: “It should be spontaneous and absolutely the guy that’s actually doing it [shouldn’t] know where it comes from. It just appears at your fingertips and is coming out of the instrument. And that is a great riff, totally unthought about, unstructured, no rules, no nothing. It’s just, one minute it ain’t there, and the next minute, there it is. [Sings ‘Satisfaction’ riff.]”
The interviewer then notified Richards that he once claimed that he dreamt the riff of ‘Satisfaction’, to which he responded: “Yes. That’s what I mean. It’s better than sleep. Riffs are not supposed to be thought about; they’re just supposed to be felt and delivered.”
