The frequent hit songs by the Yardbirds – “I’m a Man”, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”, “For Your Love”, “Heart Full of Soul”, “Shapes of Things”, “Over Under Sideways Down”, etc. – hit my eardrums with at least as powerful an impact as the greatest Rolling Stones songs, like “Brown Sugar”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Paint it Black”, “Get off of My Cloud”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Street Fighting Man”, etc.  To me though, these songs sound every bit as fresh to me today, probably because they haven’t been played to death on oldies’ radio as much as anything else.  

(May 2014)

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As with the songwriting teams that I wrote about last month, early on writing the music and writing the lyrics were handled separately.  From Wikipedia:  “One of the patterns that the Jagger/Richards collaboration initially followed has been that [Mick] Jagger wrote most of the lyrics while [Keith] Richards focused on the music.  Jagger discussed this in [a] 1995 interview with [Jann Wenner], whereby he explained how songs like ‘Get off of My Cloud’, ‘As Tears Go By’, ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Tumbling Dice’, and ‘Beast of Burden’ were created.  Jagger has also pointed out that this pattern was more prevalent in the early 1960’s, while in their later collaborations their roles have overlapped more, with both of them contributing lyrics and music.” 

(May 2015)

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