THE ROLLING STONES Released Single ‘WILD HORSES’ (Only In The USA) Today 55 Years Ago
Top singles from the past
12 June 2026
THE ROLLING STONES are about to release their 25th LP
Foreign Tongues, but let’s go back in time, more than half
a century, actually.
Today, 55 years ago, on 12 June 1971, they released the song
WILD HORSES (more than 400 million streams on Spotify), in
the US, not in the UK
It was the 3rd single from their classic LP Sticky Fingers.
Earlier that year, Marianne Faithfull overdosed on sleeping pills.
When she woke up, she told Mick Jagger, “Wild horses wouldn’t drag
me away“.
Mick recalled, “Everyone always says this 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.”
The music originated, allegedly, as a lullaby Richards was writing for his newborn son.
Keith Richards said, “If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together this is it.
I had the riff and 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.”
