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Rolling Stones quotes:Keith Richards discussing Rolling Stones tracks or his own songs
“I just write songs. If the Stones were ready to record around the same time… Some of them were actually hanging around, ideas from while the Stones were still recording. We left certain things off, and I thought, I want to pursue that one… From my point of view, any of these songs could just as well have been Stones songs – if the others had been around at the time to record them. It’s just what I had available in my locker.”
When Keith Richards talks about songwriting, he rarely separates what belongs to him from what might belong to the Rolling Stones. His creative process has always unfolded in the same wide-open space, where ideas drift, settle, and often wait for the right moment to be claimed. In that sense, the boundary between a Keith song and a Stones song is more circumstantial than intentional. Sometimes he finds himself working alone, sometimes he’s surrounded by the band, and sometimes the timing simply doesn’t match. What fascinates him most is not authorship, but possibility—what a song might become depending on who is in the room, how the energy shifts, or where inspiration decides to land. He often circles back to the fragments left behind during past sessions, the sketches pushed aside, the riffs or lines waiting quietly “in the locker,” ready to rise again when the moment calls.
How ideas move between solo work and the stones
Richards has long embraced the idea that a song isn’t fully born until it finds its players. That fluidity shapes the way he explains the overlap between his solo material and the music recorded with the Stones. His philosophy is almost casual, but also deeply revealing: “I just write songs. If the Stones were ready to record around the same time…” The distinction, then, is not artistic but logistical. If the band wasn’t assembled at the moment inspiration struck, Keith simply pushed ahead on his own. When he works, he doesn’t divide his creativity into categories; he follows momentum. To him, the core is always the same—finding truth inside a riff, a groove, or a line that refuses to fade.
The open-door philosophy behind each composition
What Richards makes clear is that any of his solo songs could have easily become Rolling Stones tracks under different circumstances. He frames it with matter-of-fact humility: “From my point of view, any of these songs could just as well have been Stones songs…” This “locker” is not just a metaphor but a living archive—unfinished verses, leftover chords, half-shaped melodies, the raw materials of decades. Keith sees songs less as personal possessions than as living entities waiting for the right chemistry to bring them to life. Whether they end up on a solo album or a Stones record is almost incidental. What matters is that they get their chance to breathe, grow, and eventually find the musicians who will push them into the world with the force and authenticity they demand.
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