“Let It Bleed” by The Rolling Stones

Until "Let It Bleed", the Rolling Stones had never named an album after one of its own songs, and the title track of their 1969 LP is a loose, leering ramble cut with Jimmy Miller producing and Glyn Johns at the desk. It opens on a bit of slide, drops into Keith Richards strumming an acoustic, then lets Bill Wyman's bass, Charlie Watts' drums and Ian Stewart's rolling piano pile in one after another. Wyman also plucked an autoharp, faint in the first verse and all but buried after it.

Mick Jagger's lyric is thick with drug and sex talk, but AllMusic's Richie Unterberger heard something needier underneath: a song about emotional dependency, a man happy to be leaned on. Japan got it as a single in early 1970.

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