“Winter” by The Rolling Stones

"Winter" was the first song the Rolling Stones cut for Goats Head Soup, their 1973 album, with Jimmy Miller producing, and the label credit tells only half the story: it reads Jagger and Richards, but Mick Jagger actually wrote it with Mick Taylor, the band's lead guitarist in those days, and Keith Richards isn't on it at all.

The kicker, as Bill Janovitz has noted, is where they made it: sunny Jamaica, of all places, and yet the song paints a northern winter so vividly you can feel the chill. The lyric grumbles about the season's miseries and still finds it beautiful, full of holiday scenes and the urge to bundle up a lover against the cold.

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