Chris Kimsey on Emotional Rescue: How He Engineered 'She's So Cold'

Chris Kimsey wasn’t just the engineer on Emotional Rescue — he was the guy who kept the tapes rolling while the band bickered. The sessions at Paris’s Pathé Marconi were tense. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were already drifting apart creatively. Kimsey’s job was to capture whatever chaos spilled onto the floor. For “She’s So Cold,” that chaos turned into a deliberate sonic gamble.

The song’s most noticeable quirk is the drum sound. Kimsey pushed Charlie Watts’s kit into a small, tiled bathroom at the studio, miking it from outside the door to get a slap-back echo that sounded almost like a dub record. He also double-tracked Jagger’s vocal, but instead of aligning them perfectly, he left one take slightly flat and the other slightly sharp, so the combined effect feels unstable — like someone shivering. The bass is pushed way forward in the mix, almost competing with the guitar, which was a conscious choice to mirror the lyrical push-and-pull.

Kimsey later said the band wasn’t happy with how raw the mix turned out. Jagger wanted it slicker. But the rough edges are what make “She’s So Cold” feel like a live take dropped into a hot, sweaty room. The bathroom reverb and the detuned vocal layers weren’t accidents — they were Kimsey’s way of making the studio itself an instrument, even when the band couldn’t agree on what key to play in.