Their manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham kept emphasizing to the two of them that there just weren’t that many obscure great songs out there.  Although Mick Jagger disputes that it was really this literal, Keith Richards relates their first songwriting experience this way:  “So what Andrew Oldham did was lock us up in the kitchen for a night and say, ‘Don’t come out without a song.’  We sat around and came up with ‘As Tears Go By’.  It was unlike most Rolling Stones material, but that’s what happens when you write songs, you immediately fly to some other realm.  The weird thing is that Andrew found Marianne Faithfull at the same time, bunged it to her and it [‘As Tears Go By’] was a f--kin’ hit for her – we were songwriters already!  But it took the rest of that year to dare to write anything for the Stones.” 

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)