“Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones

Sticky Fingers ends not in a bar fight but in a long, slow exhale. "Moonlight Mile" was the last thing the Rolling Stones cut for the 1971 album, at Stargroves at the end of October 1970, and it came out of an all-night session between Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor with Keith Richards absent. Taylor took a guitar sketch of Jagger's called "Japanese Thing" and reworked it, so the Jagger-Richards credit tells only part of the story.

Jagger plays the acoustic riff that hangs over everything, Jim Price, normally on trumpet, sits at the piano, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts roll in underneath, and Paul Buckmaster's strings, Jagger's idea, sweep it off into the night. Jimmy Miller produced. It has long been one of the band's overlooked gems, though critics Bill Janovitz and Robert Christgau have both praised how it's built.

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