“Happy” by The Rolling Stones

Keith Richards steps up to the mic on "Happy", the second single from the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main St., and it was knocked together fast: he wrote most of it in a single afternoon at the Nellcôte villa in the south of France in the summer of 1971, and it went from nothing to tape in four hours. The basic track was cut in the villa's basement on the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, Richards handling the vocal, the guitar and the bass himself while Jimmy Miller, the band's producer, sat in on drums and Bobby Keys shook the maracas.

Keys' sax, Jim Price's horns and Nicky Hopkins' piano pile on the swagger, and Richards sings like a man who would rather be loose than perfect. It reached 22 on the Hot 100, the only Stones single on that chart with him singing lead, and it has been one of his signature turns on stage ever since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.