Mick Jagger shares how he decides which songs are for The Rolling Stones

Mick Jagger may not have had the most success outside of The Rolling Stones but he did have a solo career for a time. His bandmate Keith Richards would fare much better and with less solo material than Jagger did but there is often a distinction or two between which songs are for The Rolling Stones and which are better served to Jagger’s pop interests. The veteran songwriter once broke down how he differentiated which songs were for the Miss You hitmakers and which would appear on solo efforts like Goddess in the Doorway and She’s the Boss.

His solo works are well off the mark of quality when compared to the likes of Sticky Fingers, Some Girls, and A Bigger Bang but the frontman has tried his hand at music outside of The Rolling Stones a few times. None of it is all that great but Jagger has a clear ear for which songs are better for the band. He explained his process in an interview featured in According to the Rolling Stones, a licensed compendium of interviews breaking down the band’s history.

Jagger said: “For me, doing a solo album or a Stones album is all the same, with one proviso: that when I’m writing for the Rolling Stones I don’t mind if the song sounds like the ones the Stones do, whereas if I’m writing, but not recording, with the Rolling Stones, I don’t want the song to contain too many of the cliché’s that one associates with the Rolling Stones, so I try quite hard to avoid them.

“Before the release of Forty Licks, I wrote Don’t Stop in the same period that I was writing the songs for my solo album, and I just put it to one side and said to myself, ‘This sounds very much like the Rolling Stones to me. It might be very useful in the coming months, but I’ll leave it for now and I won’t record it because I think it’s going to be better for the Stones’. Yet it will all be part of the same songwriting sessions, because I’m not really writing to order.”

Jagger would use Alexander Pushkin as an example of which writers had influenced him most of all. The veteran frontman would share as much with Rolling Stone Magazine founder, Jann Wenner, citing Pushkin and “experience” as being crucial to the band’s best works. Jagger broke down his writing style in the interview with long-time friend Wenner, suggesting his practice was to “let your mind drift” from the experiences of real life and develop a song from there.

Pushkin’s “autobiographical” stories were the push Jagger needed to bring that style to his music, saying the crucial twist was to “spice it up” when writing a story. It’s a tactic which has served Jagger for decades, with some of his very best songs based in the real world but tinged with a few flowery details.

He explained: “I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

“You can’t just experience something and leave it at that. You’ve got to try and embroider, like, any land of writing. And that’s the fun part of it. You have this one experience looking out of a window, seeing children.

“Well, you might not have felt anything, but then you just let your mind drift and dream, and you imagine an older person doing that. You put yourself in their point of view, and you start to write other things, and all this is a very subconscious thing. Out of that comes a mature thought, out of a young person.

“I was reading Pushkin, and his stories are autobiographical. But not totally, because he was never in Siberia – but his friends were, so he uses it. You use your own experience, and then you spice it up with your friends’ observations and your imagination.”