Line-up:

Drums: Charlie Watts
Bass: Bill Wyman
Acoustic guitars: Keith Richards & Mick Taylor
Electric guitar: Keith Richards
Lead vocal: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Piano: Jim Dickinson
 

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

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
 
 

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.

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 ...

(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.

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.

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.

Wild Horses, we wrote the chorus in the john of the Muscle Shoals recording studio 'cause it didn't finish off right.

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.

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.

(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!

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