Mick Jagger’s favourite song by The Rolling Stones: “Well, it is certainly good”
With a catalogue as rich as The Rolling Stones’, there are dozens of tracks that could be considered their best work. While fans often feel a deep emotional connection to a particular song that stands as their favourite, for frontman Mick Jagger, it’s more than just music—it’s his lifeblood. His choice of a favourite is rooted in personal pride, reflecting his own sense of achievement.
If The Rolling Stones never created another song after 1973, Jagger could have happily retired, knowing he was already a certified rock legend. While they took a couple of years to hone their craft, once The Stones found their feet, they were an unstoppable force that only improved with each release.
Their colossal run of albums from 1968 until 1973 was a feat of the highest creative calibre as they released Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, and Goats Head Soup consecutively. Most bands spend their entire career trying and failing to capture the brilliance of just one of those records, let alone rising to the occasion five times in as many years.
Many Stones fans would likely choose their favourite track from one of the five albums often hailed as the band’s best, and Mick Jagger agrees. When reflecting on his “finest hour” with The Rolling Stones, he didn’t succumb to the temptation of rewriting history as some cultural icons have. For example, Bob Dylan once claimed Shot of Love was his finest album in an attempt to redeem a flop from fading into obscurity. Jagger, however, is refreshingly straightforward. He calls Exile on Main Street his opus, staying true to his reputation for telling it like it is.
“Well, it is certainly good and certainly it was a very creative period, a really good period. Some very good things came in that period in music,” he once said of the 1972 record. However, three years earlier, his favourite Rolling Stones track was whisked into wondrous existence. He isn’t alone in this thinking either; the track is Martin Scorsese’s favourite, writer Greil Marcus’s favourite, and many other millions’ most cherished Stones cut.
The eternally cinematic ‘Gimme Shelter’ is the perfect rock anthem, capturing the stormy day on which it was written. As the electrifying opener to Let It Bleed, the song became a haunting backdrop to the dark days of the Vietnam War. Its melodic intensity carries a sense of urgent vitality, with its iconic sound inspired by Chuck Berry’s classic electric-acoustic style, making it a powerful reflection of its time.
When appraising the apocalyptic masterpiece, Jagger once recalled: “We thought, ‘Well, it’d be great to have a woman come and do the rape/murder verse,’ or chorus, or whatever you want to call it’. We randomly phoned up this poor lady [Merry Clayton] in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing.”
Adding more insight into the famous day in the studio, Jagger noted, “She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It’s not the sort of lyric you give everyone — ‘Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away’ — but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record. She joins the chorus. It’s been a great live song ever since.”
“It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit,” Jagger said of the track that now sadly has a remaining prescience. When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune. It’s still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week. It’s been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.”
It’s also the perfect song for Jagger. He might not be the greatest singer of all time—as Keith Richards has frequently reminded him—but the frontman can inject a dose of drama into reading the phonebook. The cinematic overture of ‘Gimme Shelter‘ suits his style well. As he said of his performative style: “[Mick Jagger is] a character perhaps. Or different characters within characters because you’ve got to do the sad, the happy, the cynical—whatever song you’re doing. It’s a bit like acting.”
Vitally, ‘Gimme Shelter’ is a track that embodies The Rolling Stones. Refreshingly, it’s also their most famous effort, and while many acts grow to hate their biggest song, Jagger holds nothing but fondness towards the Let It Bleed opener.
