Wild Horses
Composers: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date: December 1969 & February 1970
Recording locations: Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, Florence,
Alabama, USA & Olympic Sound
Studios, London, England
Producer: Jimmy Miller Chief
engineers: Jimmy Johnson,
Glyn
Johns & Andy Johns
Performed onstage: 1971, 1975-76, 1994-95, 1997, 2002-03, 2005-06,
2012-16, 2018, 2021-22, 2024

Line-up:
Drums:
Charlie Watts
Bass: Bill Wyman
12-string
acoustic guitar: Keith
Richards
Acoustic guitar
(Nashville tuning): Mick
Taylor
Electric guitar: Keith Richards
Lead vocal: Mick Jagger
Background vocals:
Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Tack piano: Jim Dickinson
Percussion: Mick Jagger
Childhood living
is easy to do
The things you
wanted I bought them for you
Graceless lady,
you know who I am
You know I can't
let you slide through my hands
Wild
horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild
horses couldn't drag me away
I watched
you suffer a dull aching pain
Now you decided
to show me the same
No sweeping
exits or offstage lines
Could make me
feel bitter or treat you unkind
Wild
horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild
horses couldn't drag me away
I know I
dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my
freedom but I don't have much time
Faith has been
broken, tears must be cried
Let's do some
living after we die
Wild
horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild
horses, we'll ride them someday
Wild
horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild
horses, we'll ride them someday
TrackTalk
If there is one classic way of Mick and I working together, this
is it. I had the riff and the chorus line, Mick got stuck into the
verses. Just like Satisfaction.
Wild Horses was about the usual thing of not wanting to be
on the road, being a million miles from where you want to be.
- Keith Richards, 1993
Wild Horses almost wrote
itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, fucking around
with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a
twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character
and sound. There's a certain forlorness that can come out of a
twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string
open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these
ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was
translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing - twelve-string
slide - into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
Wild Horses, we wrote the chorus in the john of the Muscle
Shoals recording studio 'cause it didn't finish off right.
- Keith Richards, 1971
It was one of those magical moments when things come
together. It's like Satisfaction.
You just dream it, and suddenly it's all in your hands. Once
you've got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what's
the next phrase you're going to use? It's got to be couldn't drag
me away.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
(I)t was (Keith's) melody. And he wrote the
phrase wild horses, but I wrote the rest of it. I like the
song. It's an example of a pop song. Taking this cliché wild
horses, which is awful, really, but making it work without
sounding like a cliché when you're doing it.
- Mick Jagger, 1995
On Wild Horses, it sounds like a
12-string that Mick Taylor's playing, but it's a Nashville-strung
guitar. It gives you that really nice ring that a 12-string will
give you, without that boom underneath.
- Keith Richards, 1977
I played one of Keith's Gibson acoustic
guitars in what they call a Nashville tuning. The guitar is tuned
exactly the same way as regular tuning, but you use all first and
second strings and you tune them in octaves. It's kind of like
playing a 12-string guitar without the other six strings. That's
the best way to describe it. I think I played a 12-string too.
Keith played the electric solo on Wild Horses.
- Mick Taylor, 1979
Wild Horses
was all Jagger - pure
Mick. Even Ian Stewart didn't play on it. Stu had an aversion to
minor chords or too many chord changes.
- Mick Taylor, 2011
(D)uring Wild Horses Jim Dickinson
showed up, from Memphis. What happened is that their touring piano
player, who was also their road manager, Ian Stewart, he played on
Brown Sugar some, but during Wild Horses Jim
Dickenson was out behind where we put the guitar amps... (It) was
our tack piano, an old upright piano; we put tacks on the hammers
so it sounded like a honky tonk. Anyway, Jim was back there just
tiddling on it, playing along with what they had settled on as the
groove, and Keith walked by and said, Hey you need to play
that!
- Jimmy Johnson, 2005
Yeah (it has to do with Marlon's birth),'cause
I knew we were going to have to go to America and start work
again, to get me off me ass, and not really wanting to go away. It
was a very delicate moment, the kid's only two months old, and
you're goin' away. Millions of people do it all the time but still
...
- Keith Richards, 1971
I wrote this song because I was doing good at
home with my old lady, and I wrote it like a love song. I just had
this, Wild horses couldn't drag me away, and I gave it to
Mick, and Marianne (Faithfull) just ran off with this guy and he
changed it all around but it's still beautiful.
- Keith Richards, December
4, 1969, in Muscle Shoals
Studios, Alabama (from Stanley Booth's
The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones)
I remember we sat around originally doing this
with Gram Parsons, and I think his version came out slightly
before ours. Everyone always says it was written about Marianne
but I don't think it was; that was all well over by then. But I
was definitely very inside this piece emotionally. This is very
personal, evocative, and sad. It all sounds rather doomy now, but
it was quite a heavy time.
- Mick Jagger, 1993
The vulnerability! Well, that's what you've
got to do with these kinds of tunes. You've got to emote it,
otherwise it's meaningless. When I wrote those verses I was
feeling vulnerable, so you take it up.
- Mick Jagger, 2015
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