Who did The Rolling Stones write ‘Wild Horses’ about?
Amid a discography of 422 songs, ‘Wild Horses’ still remains one of the best-beloved that The Rolling Stones have ever created. It is celebrated as a heartfelt tearjerker that illuminates the sincerity underneath the band’s sentiment, proving the epithet of “it’s only rock ‘n’ roll” to be a misnomer.
‘Wild Horses’ is a ballad that has long been thought to have been written about Marianne Faithfull, but the anthem actually has a complex creative history. When the band first released it in 1971 as part of their classic record Sticky Fingers, the track was already familiar to many. The world had heard it once before.
As it happens, a version of the iconic song was released in 1970 by the pioneers of ‘Cosmic American Music’, The Flying Burrito brothers. Led by ex-Byrds member Gram Parsons, the band were good friends of The Rolling Stones and came across the track thanks to Mick Jagger.
In the liner notes to the Rolling Stones compilation Jump Back, Jagger revealed: “I remember we sat around originally doing this with Gram Parsons, and I think his version came out slightly before ours. Everyone always says this was written about Marianne, but I don’t think it was; that was all well over by then.”
Nevertheless, he concludes: “But I was definitely very inside this piece emotionally.”
One of the counterculture’s most polarising figures, David Crosby, credits Parsons with the song, although the provenance of his take is questionable. Allegedly, handwritten copies of the lyrics were found in Parsons’ notebook, as well as in a letter to his sister, Avis. It is said that after the death of their parents, Parsons felt personally responsible for his sister and felt guilty for leaving her at home as he pursued music.
Parsons first bumped into The Rolling Stones around 1968 after his brief stint in folk-rock legends The Byrds. A 1972 report in Rolling Stone even asserted that Jagger actually wrote the song “for and about” Parsons. In 2021, the publication also claimed that Parsons first heard ‘Wild Horses’ after Jagger played him a demo of it. It is said Jagger sent Parsons the master recording and asked him to add some of his iconic steel guitar to it.
Parsons said at the time: “And we went into the Record Plant… and somebody came in with some sort of strange dust and things just went haywire… the engineer forgot where he was and things like that. So they didn’t use that track, and I asked Mick if we could put it on our mixed album if we didn’t release it as a single, and he thought about it and said alright.” Keith Richards probably approved, too, given that he considers Parsons perhaps the finest rock ‘n’ roll singer of all time.
Richards also most certainly would’ve had a say in the matter, given that he also had a massive hand in writing it. The Stones recorded their unforgettable version of ‘Wild Horses’ at Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama in December 1969. In his tell-all autobiography, Life, guitarist Keith Richards explained: “‘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.”
Building on how the song came about, Richards said: “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.” Thus, it would seem that he crafted the bulk of the piece without a real protagonist in mind, just a funky tuning and some poetic phrasing.
Another story favoured by fans is that Faithfull said the song’s famous phrase to Jagger after he’d woken from a drug-induced coma, shortly before they had ended their romantic relationship. However, this claim is disputed by many figures involved. Given that it was the 1960s and that no one seems to know for certain where the song comes from, with a tangle of tales that fail to corroborate a clear picture, it remains a mystery even to those involved. Although the “graceless lady” line has long been thought to have been about Faithfull, it is rarely denied.
In the end, it seems as if ‘Wild Horses’ came about as a culmination of factors. Gram Parsons and Marianne Faithfull probably influenced the song, even if only subliminally, as Jagger and Richards’ accounts vary. Parsons may well have even borrowed a chord or phrase or two. But mostly, Richards wrote the song, and then Jagger finished it off, taking out some of Richards’ parts and adding his own. A classic tale in The Rolling Stones’ discography.
As to what they had on their minds, well, it’s much like writing any song; as Richards has said, songwriting is all about emotion and feel, so with something as wavering as ‘Wild Horses’, you don’t simply sit down, pen it with specifics in mind, and block out the rest.