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From Songfacts: This was the first Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition. They wrote it when their manager, Andrew Oldham, locked them in his kitchen and told them to write some songs. At the time, The Stones were content to interpret songs written by other artists. This helped give Mick and Keith the confidence that they could be songwriters as well as performers.
A Pop ballad, this was a big departure from the Blues songs The Stones were covering at the time.
This was released as a single only in the US. It was their first Top 40 hit in America.
Keith Richards said in 1971: “‘Tell Me,’ which was pulled out as a single in America, was a dub. Half those records were dubs on that first album, that Mick and I and Charlie and I’d put a bass on or maybe Bill was there and he’d put a bass on Let’s put it down while we remember it and the next thing we know is, Oh look, track 8 is that dub we did a couple months ago. That’s how little control we had.”
Mick Jagger explained in a 1995 promotional interview: “Keith was playing 12-string and singing harmonies into the same microphone as the 12-string. We recorded it in this tiny studio in the West End of London called Regent Sound, which was a demo studio. I think the whole of that album was recorded in there. But it’s very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very POP song, as opposed to all the blues covers and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.”
From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book: As the first recorded number credited to Mick Jagger–Keith Richards, “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back),” marked an important turning point for the pair. It also marked their ascendancy over the group and, as a consequence, the end of Brian Jones’s leadership, at least on a musical level. According to the legend, it was Oldham who essentially forced Jagger and Richards to shut themselves away in a room and stay there until they had written their first song or two. Wyman, however, contests this legend: “Andrew had been encouraging them to write their own songs for some time, although the story that he locked them in the flat until they wrote some material is just another Rolling Stones myth.” Whatever the facts of the matter, the duo had embarked on a highly promising path and started to write more and more songs. These include “My Only Girl,” recorded by Gene Pitney with the title “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday” in early 1964. The first official Jagger-Richards composition comes as something of a surprise in that it is a pop ballad rather than a blues number, thereby confirming the growing influence of Andrew Oldham, who sees this as a way of reaching a wider audience—at the expense of Jones, who was a purist of the Chicago twelve-bar blues. The lyrics are somewhat sentimental: I want you back again/I want your love again. This is far closer to the sweet love songs of the beat groups than to the torrid “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and covers of Motown soul numbers, and the black rock ’n’ roll music of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Jagger explains in 1968: “We didn’t want to do blues forever, we just wanted to turn people on to other people who were very good and not carry on doing it ourselves.” (Ref. tell me)
