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www.wsj.com/articles/mick-jagger-and-moonlight-mile-1432735648 Mick Jagger and ‘Moonlight Mile’
On their North American tour, the Rolling Stones are performing the eclectic ‘Moonlight Mile.’ Mick Jagger recalls a song inspired by being on the road and longing for home
By Marc Myers
Updated May 28, 2015 12:12 p.m. ET
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For the first time in years, the Rolling Stones are performing “Moonlight Mile” at arenas during their 15-city North American “Zip Code” concert tour. Written by Mick Jagger in 1970, the eclectic road song closed “Sticky Fingers,” the band’s 1971 album, which is being reissued on June 9 by Universal as a two-CD set with bonus material.
Fans have long speculated about the song’s meaning, with many assuming that lyrics such as “a head full of snow” and “moonlight mile” were code for cocaine. Mr. Jagger dismissed such suggestions last week, saying the song was written about his loneliness during a rigorous European tour in the summer of 1970 and his elation upon returning home.
The original basic studio recording of “Moonlight Mile” featured only Mr. Jagger, guitarist Mick Taylor and drummer Charlie Watts, with additional guitars, piano, bass and strings overdubbed later. Mr. Jagger, 71, talked about how the song was written and recorded. Edited from an interview:
Mick Jagger: I wrote some of the early lyrics to “Moonlight Mile” in a songbook I carried around when we were on tour in the summer of 1970. I was growing road-weary and homesick then. I’m sure the idea for the song first came to me one night while we were on a train and the moon was out. I don’t recall. I know I didn’t want to literalize how I was feeling. That’s not really a very good thing to do when you’re writing lyrics, you know? The feeling I had at that moment was how difficult it was to be touring and how I wasn’t looking forward to going out and doing it again. It’s a very lonely thing, and my lyrics reflected that.
I also came up with an Oriental-Indian riff on my acoustic guitar. At some point during the tour I played it for [Stones guitarist] Mick Taylor, because I thought he would like it. At that point, I really hadn’t intended on recording the song. Sometimes you don’t want to record what you’re writing. You think, “This isn’t worth recording, this is just my doodling.”
When we finished our European tour in October 1970, we were at Stargroves, my country house in England. We were sitting around one night and I started working on what I had initially written. I felt great. I was in my house again and it was very relaxing. So the song became about that—looking forward to returning from a foreign place while looking out the window of a train and the images of the railway line going by in the moonlight.
But the lyrics I wrote didn’t come across like that, because they weren’t so on the nose. They were more imaginative and wistful than if I had written them straight, like, “I’m tired of the road,” you know? The feeling I wanted was the image of elongated space that you’re traveling through to get home: “Oh I am sleeping under strange, strange skies / Just another mad, mad day on the road / My dreams is fading down the railway line / I’m just about a moonlight mile down the road.” It was about the difficulty I was going through of being away.
The Rolling Stones press shot for the ‘Sticky Fingers’ album, 1971 ENLARGE
The Rolling Stones press shot for the ‘Sticky Fingers’ album, 1971 Photo: Peter Webb
In most cases now, I try to analyze what I’m writing and try to make sense of it and re-jig the grammar and everything. I try not to cross between first person and third person and all those things you’re not supposed to do. Back then, I didn’t really do that, and in this song, I don’t really think it matters. I think it’s good that I just did what I was feeling. There are a lot of different images jumbled in there that come across as one. But it’s definitely not about cocaine. There’s no hidden meaning in there about that. It’s feeling I’m finally home and thinking about the times when I was lonely on the road.
Sometimes you write songs on your own and you do the demo and then you go into the studio and change it around. But sometimes you just write songs and record them at the same time. This was one of those songs, though I did add a bit more to it later. So at Stargroves, I was just doodling the song and I worked out a couple of different parts to it.
At some point during the evening, I think Keith [Richards] left to go home, and Bill [Wyman] for some reason wasn’t there. After Keith left, just Charlie, myself and Mick were in the room. I finished doodling pretty late, probably around midnight, and we started playing the song to see how it sounded.
I’d already come up with the guitar riff, so I started playing it and singing. I was playing my guitar when Mick added something and then Charlie started playing. That’s when I realized it was more than doodling, that this was a real song we could record as we fooled around with it. The instrumentation was really interesting and created this really interesting mood.
Several hours later, we decided to record. At the house, there was a big living room when you walked in, sort of a big double-height imitation-gothic hall. It had a nice high ceiling, so we recorded most everything in there. Mick and I were both familiar with the song’s melody lines. But then you get someone like Charlie playing the drums and you find you’re building an atmosphere.
Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about whether the song’s opening would be Japanese or Indian. Obviously, the tones or scales I used gave it an Oriental flavor, which is echoed later in the string writing. Most of the song is more Indian to me. I listened to a lot of Indian music then, and little bits rubbed off on me. These things were hinted at when the song goes into the B section, where the beat comes in [sings]: “Oh I’m sleeping under strange, strange skies”—when it goes into that. Then it’s kind of left behind and it goes into something else. The verses are also slightly Indian in their inception.
Charlie’s use of the mallets was remarkable and let him dispense with the big offbeat. So you get this rhythmic subtlety that goes along with the guitar lines. It’s so moody. But nothing was planned. It was all spur of the moment, which is the beauty of the song. Of course, some of the things we added later were there to enhance the mood we had come up with—like overdubbed guitars by Keith and Mick, Bill’s bass, Jimmy Price’s piano and Paul Buckmaster’s strings. It was a question of building the song and then bringing down the dynamic and how you use the instrumentation to do that.
What makes “Moonlight Mile” special is that it’s a song and a recording at once. All these things —the strange plinking piano, the tom-tommy mallets on the drums, the different guitars—they all came together to produce a feeling of vulnerability and loneliness, you know what I mean? I think the three of us finished recording the basic track around 6 a.m. The sun was coming up.
Later, I added a bit of double-tracking to fill out my vocal, but not much. I actually do that quite a lot on recordings. Sometimes you don’t hear it or you’re not even aware of it. On “Moonlight Mile,” I double-tracked the odd lines just for emphasis. On some records I’ll double-track the lead vocals and then do harmonies up and harmonies down to give them a stronger feel. In this case, we mixed the song so the double-track sound was just marginally there.
It was my idea to use Paul [Buckmaster] to arrange the strings. I had used him before, on the end of “Sway” [on “Sticky Fingers”]. For this piece, we thought it would be nice to build the song with strings and have those hinted quarter-tones Paul’s so good at. His orchestration echoes what I’m singing and builds into the coda, so it amplifies all the stuff you heard before in a rather subtle way. Then he has a really nice edit that mellows when I sing, “Yeah, I’m coming home.”
The other day I was listening to the original “Moonlight Mile” before we rehearsed it in Los Angeles for the tour. I was with Bernard Fowler, who has been my background vocalist since ’85. He’s doing my double-track voices on stage. Unfortunately I can’t do them live [laughs]. Anyway, it was quite a process. We went through the lines on the original recording to analyze which ones I had done alone and which ones I had doubled. In performance, the doubling effect is even bigger than on the album because there are more people singing on it.
On our current tour, I play electric guitar on “Moonlight Mile” instead of acoustic guitar, which I played on the original. I play the electric open-tuned, the same way I did on “Sticky Fingers.” I don’t really like how acoustic guitar sounds live. It sounds all banjo-y to me. The amplification of an acoustic guitar isn’t really brilliant, you know? To be honest, it’s much easier playing electric on stage because it’s more controllable—the sound and effects and everything. So I sound slightly different, but the arrangement has the same mood. We also have a really nice string sample that sounds close to the original strings. That helps the ending build.
Keith plays an open-tuned guitar with me on stage. He kind of does a bit of what my part is and does other things, too. There’s a lot going on with the live version. I just hope it’s not too cluttered. The way we do it now is much more confident than on the album, and I’m a lot more confident with it. When you get the song out in a very big place, it still seems quite intimate. Yet it’s still hard to do in a large arena, you know? It’s hard to get it right. But I don’t know. I hope people like it. I more or less do the vocal in a similar style, so I don’t change that. It’s not much more projected or anything, and it’s pretty personal and honest.
When I hear “Moonlight Mile” now, I really like it. I think it’s a good piece of music. It’s unusual, and it’s still accessible and delicate and has a climax and comes back down and ends quite well. I suppose I’ve also grown a little more accustomed to touring [laughs].
