The Ironic Age of 'As Tears Go By': A Young Mick Jagger's Premonition of Old Age

The cruelest joke of “As Tears Go By” is that Mick Jagger wrote it at 22, imagining the loneliness of old age—then lived to sing it as an 80-year-old man. The song wasn’t even originally a Stones track. Andrew Loog Oldham locked Jagger and Keith Richards in a kitchen and told them to write something like a Bacharach ballad; the result was a melody so soft it felt out of place for the bad-boy band.

They handed it to Marianne Faithfull, who scored a hit in 1964. The Stones didn’t record it themselves until 1965, and when they did, they stripped it to a melancholy string arrangement—deliberately undercutting their own rock-and-roll image. The irony cuts both ways: a young man singing about the sorrow of aging, and a rebellious band choosing a weepy ballad as their first real departure from R&B. Decades later, Jagger’s weathered voice singing “I sit and watch the children play” sounds less like a lyric and more like a diary entry he wrote far too early.