Keith Richards started it as a lullaby for a baby he was about to leave behind. Mick Jagger kept one line of it and wrote a song about a relationship instead. Another band released it first.
Here is where the title phrase came from, what each writer contributed, and why the Stones’ own version sat in a vault for a year and a half.
The Short Answer
Being taken away from someone against your will. Richards began it in 1969 about not wanting to go on tour and leave his newborn son Marlon, and wrote in his memoir Life that it was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road, a million miles from where you want to be. Jagger’s verses turned it into a man refusing to let a relationship end. The one thing both versions share is the promise that nothing could drag him away.
The Story Behind the Song
Marlon Richards was born in August 1969. His father, facing a tour, wrote a melancholy chord sequence on a twelve-string acoustic and a chorus to go with it, and handed the rest to Jagger.
Richards has described this as the classic way he and Jagger worked, and said the song almost wrote itself. What came back was not about a child.
The band recorded it at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama between 2 and 4 December 1969, the last of three songs cut there after “Brown Sugar” and “You Gotta Move.” Jim Dickinson played tack piano, and Mick Taylor used a Nashville tuning on guitar. Those sessions were filmed for the documentary Gimme Shelter.
Where does the phrase come from?
The English expression that wild horses could not drag you away, meaning nothing could. It has been in use for centuries and Richards had it in the chorus from the start.
There is also a darker account attached to it. Earlier in 1969 Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s girlfriend at the time, nearly died after an overdose, and by her account the phrase was among the first things she said to him when she regained consciousness.
Is it about Marianne Faithfull?
Jagger says no, and has said so for decades. In the liner notes to the 1993 compilation Jump Back he said everyone always assumes it was written about her, that he does not think it was, and that the relationship was well over by then.
He then added the qualifier that keeps the question alive. He said he was definitely very inside this piece emotionally, which is not a denial of anything except the specific name.
He has also described the song as very personal, evocative and sad, without ever attaching it to a person. The most defensible reading is that Jagger was writing about the end of something while declining to say which something.
Why did another band release it first?
Because Gram Parsons asked. Parsons was close to Richards, had helped with the arrangement of “Country Honk” on Let It Bleed, and persuaded Jagger and Richards to let him record this with the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Their version came out on Burrito Deluxe in 1970. The Stones’ recording had been finished since December 1969 but was held back by contractual and legal problems until Sticky Fingers arrived on 23 April 1971.
Jagger’s recollection is that they sat around working on it with Parsons, and that Parsons’ version came out slightly before theirs. It is a rare case of a major band’s song being introduced to the world by a friend.
What does the studio choice explain?
The sound. Muscle Shoals is a soul and country studio in Alabama, and the Stones went there in the middle of an American tour specifically to work in that environment.
The result is a country ballad played by an English blues band, with acoustic guitars, tack piano and no attempt at grandeur. It is the closest the Stones ever came to sounding tender without irony.
How did it chart?
The American single, released on 12 June 1971 with “Sway” on the reverse, reached number twenty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100. That is modest for a Rolling Stones single and irrelevant to how the song is now regarded.
Sticky Fingers went to number one. Along with “Brown Sugar,” this is one of only two songs on that album where the band share ownership of the rights with ABKCO rather than holding them outright.
Why do the two meanings not cancel out?
Because they describe the same feeling from different angles. A man on the road missing his infant son and a man watching a relationship end are both people being separated from someone by forces they are not choosing.
Richards supplied the emotion and the chorus. Jagger supplied a situation to hang it on. The song works because the music is doing the first job regardless of what the verses say.
Why it lasted
Because it is the least defended thing the Rolling Stones ever recorded. There is no swagger in it, no joke, and no distance between the singer and what he is saying, which is not a description that fits much else in their catalogue.
Ballads by bands known for something else often reach people who never connect the two; when you have the song and not the name, our song lyrics search sorts it out.