Wild Horses

The band recorded it from 2 to 4 December 1969 at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama while the Maysles brothers were filming Gimme Shelter. Richards said the music began as a lullaby for his newborn son and grew out of experiments with open tuning on a twelve-string guitar. He said he had the riff and the chorus line and Jagger got into the verses. Jagger said he was definitely very inside the piece emotionally, but doubted it was written about Marianne Faithfull. Richards played twelve-string acoustic and electric guitar and Mick Taylor played a Nashville-tuned acoustic. Ian Stewart refused to play the tack piano part because of the minor chords, so Jim Dickinson played it.

It came out as the album's second American single in June 1971, with Sway on the B-side, and reached number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Flying Burrito Brothers released it first, in April 1970, after Gram Parsons heard a demo. The Stones released a stripped acoustic version in 1995. Rolling Stone ranked it number 334 in 2004 and number 193 in 2021.