One of the most pathos song from Glimmer Twins is certainly Midnight Rambler: here's Keith talking about playng with Mick Taylor.
Richards discusses “You Got the Silver,” a song that he sang on the Stones’ 1969 classic, Let It Bleed. “I didn’t think there was any coherence. There’s very little coherence to what I do,” he says. “Because I don’t think that’s the point. Can I touch a feeling? Because most people’s feelings… you can’t really understand why you’re feeling that way”
“Also,” he said, “I love singing about precious metal. I don’t mean heavy metal! I mean precious.”In another video, he was asked what song he wishes he’d written; his answer was “Are You Lonely for Me,” a 1966 R&B classic written by Bert Berns for Freddie Scott.
The original version was entitled “Paint It Black” without a comma. Keith Richards later said that the comma was added by the record label, Decca. Stones’ co-guitarist Ronnie Wood disclosed that Keith Richards has trouble remembering how to play this song. He revealed, “We always have this moment of hesitation where we don’t know if Keith’s going to get the intro right.”
# ‘Sweet Black Angel’ crept into it, and I realized Mick was writing about Angela Davis, the famous activist who was under arrest at the time. We had never met her, but we admired her from afar. Mick and I made the record and said, ‘That’s very nice,’ but it never seemed to really fit into a Stones show. We played it live only once, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. But anything can happen with the Stones. I’ll throw it in during 
rehearsal and see what happens. It’s still quite relevant, isn’t it? And that’s unfortunate. This stuff has stayed with us for too long.”
Let It Bleed (1969) “I had been sitting by the window of my friend Robert Fraser’s apartment on Mount Street in London with an acoustic guitar when suddenly the sky went completely black and an incredible monsoon came down. It was just people running about looking for shelter—that was the germ of the idea. But as we went further into, we went further into it until it became, you know, rape and murder are ‘just a shot away.’ I can’t think of a time I ever started a song off saying,
‘This is going to be a duet,’ but somewhere in the process of making the record it suddenly became obvious that we needed a female voice. Mick and I both looked at each other and said, ‘Man, we need a bitch in this!’ So Jack Nitzsche called up the singer Merry Clayton, and she was at the studio within an hour, and we cut it. Just like that.”
# Some Girls (1978) “Those who say it’s about one woman in particular, they’ve got it all wrong. We were trying to write for a slightly broader audience than just Anita Pallenberg or Marianne Faithfull. Although that’s not to say they didn’t have some influence in there somewhere. I mean, what’s close by is close by! I’ve always felt it’s one of my best soul songs. It was another strict collaboration between Mick and me. I think I had the first verse—
‘I’ll never be your beast of burden’—along with the hook, and we were still working very much in our traditional way: Here’s the idea, here’s the song, now run away and fill it in! Some of the theories surrounding it are very intriguing, but they’re about as divorced from reality as can be.
I find it quite amusing that there are people in the world who spend a lot of their time trying to decode something that is, at the end of the day, completely undecodable. I mean, even I’ve forgotten the code!”
A Part (the once indicated with #) of this article originally appears in the November 2017 issue of Harper's Bazaar.
