The Rolling Stones songs that wrote themselves: “If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together this is it”
Sometimes, songs are tricky beasts. There are plenty of stories across music history about artists battling with inspiration for months, even years, trying to get it to work. They can spend ages chewing over the right words, melodies or riffs as they attempt to get their idea out of their head and onto tape in a difficult battle. Or it can be the exact opposite, and a song can land in their laps and be fully formed, like these two songs from The Rolling Stones.
How and why that happens remains a mystery. Some assigned it to a spirit up above who concerns themselves with music and art, raining ideas down on a chosen cast of creatives. Other theories range from spiritual mythology to pure science, as people try to no avail to try and understand how inspiration strikes and how an idea forms itself in our brains.
But while some ideas are simple to understand as they start small and need to be grown and nurtured over time, involving a level of skill and effort to get it to a finished product, others take no work at all. Certainly, the Stones have experienced both cases, but for two songs, Keith Richards remembers them as taking no work at all.
“‘Wild Horses’ almost wrote itself,” Richards said of one stand-out track. To him, if only one song could be selected to represent his collaborative relationship with Mick Jagger, it would be this one as he explained, “If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together this is it. I had the riff and chorus line, Mick got stuck into the verses.” Once that initial idea was there, both seemed to disappear into their own flow states, working on the part they were best at. When they emerged, after what felt like a moment, this song was there.
It’s almost as if it came too easily, so easily that the band didn’t quite trust it. Initially, they passed it onto the Flying Burrito Brothers who released it in 1970, before they shared their own take in 1971.
It’s a similar story for another track later on in the decade. Even as Jagger and Richards’ relationship changed and became strained as it headed towards the 1980s, their magical ability to turn a flash of inspiration into a finished track remained sharp.
Perhaps the secret to it lies in their friendship, as their long-term understanding of one another seemed to allow them to work so in sync that even if Jagger started things off, Richards knew exactly what to do next. They would bat inspiration between them, possibly hacking the system of divine intervention by creating their own sparks of ideas, kindling a fire by working on it together and putting their individual brains and talents together in the way they do.
“The guitar riff basically suggested itself from the melody Mick was singing,” he said, talking about their 1978 track ‘Miss You’. Despite being inspired by Jagger having “been to too many nightclubs” and looking towards disco for inspiration, it still took no real effort on Richards’ part to find the exact right hook and write the song’s iconic riff.
