The Recording of 'Love Is Strong' at Ronnie Wood's Irish Estate and the Stones' Cross-Dressing Video

The Rolling Stones recorded the core of Voodoo Lounge at Ronnie Wood’s Irish estate, Sandymount, in County Kildare—a sprawling Georgian pile where the band lived together for months in 1993. The track “Love Is Strong” came out of those sessions, and it’s the rare Stones song that actually sounds like the house: loose, humid, with a train-rattle rhythm that nearly derails. Keith Richards said he was noodling on a Dobro with a bottleneck, and the slide part just fell out—that choked, crying lead that threads through the whole track. It wasn’t planned; it just happened during a tape run, and they kept it.

The slide guitar is the heart of the song, and it’s also the clue that the band was shaking off the ’80s polish. Don Was, the producer, pushed them to play live in the room, and you can hear the air between the instruments. The video, directed by David Fincher, had Mick Jagger, Keith, Ron, and Charlie Watts dressed as homeless stalkers—wigs, overcoats, fake beards—trailing a model through New York. It was a deliberate return to the outlaw mystique they’d abandoned in the steel-drum-and-sequins MTV years. The cross-dressing wasn’t just shock value; it was the band saying they were still weird, still dangerous, still willing to fuck with their image. “Love Is Strong” became the album’s lead single, hit No. 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and proved the Stones could still write a song that didn’t sound like a parody of themselves.