野马 (1971)

"Wild Horses" is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones from their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. It was also released on 12 June 1971 as a single, with "Sway" as its B-side. However, The Flying Burrito Brothers were the first to release the song nearly a year earlier in April 1970, with a cover appearing on their second album.

Rolling Stone ranked the song number 334 in its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list in 2004 and number 193 in its 2021 update.

Recording

"Wild Horses" was recorded from 2–4 December 1969 at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama while Albert and David Maysles were shooting Gimme Shelter. The song was not released for over a year due to legal wrangling with the band's former label ABKCO Records and Allen Klein. "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar" are the only two songs on Sticky Fingers (1971) where the Stones co-own the rights with ABKCO Records.

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." 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."

The music originated as a lullaby Richards was writing for his newborn son. The style emerged from Richards' experiments with open tuning a twelve-string guitar. He wrote, "There's a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing—twelve-string slide-into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar."

Richards performs on both electric and 12-string acoustic guitar. Mick Taylor plays a Nashville tuned acoustic guitar, in which the EADG strings of the acoustic guitar are strung an octave higher than in standard tuning. Ian Stewart refused to perform the tack piano part on the track due to the prevalence of minor chords, which he dismissed as "Chinese". Jim Dickinson played the piano instead.

Personnel

The Rolling Stones

• Mick Jagger – vocals
• Keith Richards – twelve string acoustic guitar, electric guitar, backing vocals
• Mick Taylor – Nashville tuned acoustic guitar
• Bill Wyman – bass guitar
• Charlie Watts – drums

Additional personnel

Jim Dickinson – tack piano

Release and legacy

"Wild Horses" was released as the album's second US-only single in June 1971. It reached number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Record World predicted, "[this] beautiful stylistic shift of gears will go directly to top". Billboard called it, "a potent followup to their 'Brown Sugar' smash in this change-of-pace rock ballad material."

In 1995, The Rolling Stones recorded an acoustic version of "Wild Horses" for Stripped. A black and white music video of the song was produced to promote the album.

An instrumental version of the song is featured during the end credits of Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary film Shine a Light (2008).

An early, acoustic take of "Wild Horses" was released on the Deluxe and Super Deluxe versions of the reissued Sticky Fingers album on 8 June 2015.

The song appears on a handful of the Rolling Stones' concert DVDs: Bridges to Babylon Tour '97–98 (1998), Rolling Stones - Four Flicks (2003), and The Biggest Bang (2007).

Jagger's ex-wife Jerry Hall named "Wild Horses" her favourite Rolling Stones song.

"Wild Horses" figures prominently in the films Adaptation (2002) and Camp (2003). Alyson Michalka sang the song in episode "Fancy Dan" (S1: E16) of Hellcats in 2011. The song was played during Li'l Sebastian's memorial service on Parks and Recreation (S3: E16). It also appeared during the Season 1 finale of BoJack Horseman and in Episode 11, Season 5 of Billions.

Other versions

Gram Parsons heard a demo of the song after the Altamont disaster and asked if The Flying Burrito Brothers could cover it. The Rolling Stones couriered a temporary mix to the band and made them promise not to release their cover as a single. Gram wrote out the lyrics three times in his journal. One copy includes the chords. The band's cover version was included on their 1970 album Burrito Deluxe, released almost a year before the Rolling Stones' original appeared on Sticky Fingers.

The song has been covered extensively, including versions by Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, Neil Young, Labelle, Sheryl Crow, Natasha Bedingfield, Guns N'Roses, Bush, and Garbage. The band Old & In the Way did a bluegrass version on their debut album.