While Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are an excellent songwriting duo for The Rolling Stones, they haven’t had the same success as the Paul McCartney and John Lennon partnership. However, the Lennon-McCartney duo eventually fell apart, while the Richards-Jagger pair is still together today. Richards believed there was a key difference between the two partnerships, one that might have made his last longer.
Keith Richards believes his partnership with Mick Jagger was more collaborative
McCartney and Lennon started writing songs together before The Beatles even started. For example, the pair wrote “I Saw Her Standing There” while skipping school in Liverpool. However, in the later days of the band, the team became less collaborative and were writing songs by themselves, despite them still being credited under the Lennon-McCartney banner.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Keith Richards compared his work with Mick Jagger to Lennon and McCartney. He said that one essential difference was that he would usually write the melody, and Jagger would write the words. Each song would have bits of both, rather than each piece being more of an individual effort.
“Mick writes more melodies now than he used to. The first things, usually I wrote the melody and Mick wrote the words,” Richards said. “It’s not gotten like the Lennon-McCartney thing got where they wrote completely by themselves. Every song we’ve got to have pieces of each other in it.”
By the late 1960s, The Beatles made albums like The White Album. Even though the band was still playing together, the writing for each song was very individualized. The fab four were all going in different directions creatively, leading to their inevitable split in 1970.
Jagger once shared his theory for why Lennon-McCartney fell apart
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger discussed his partnership with Keith Richards. The interviewer noted that their relationship is still alive, while Lennon and McCartney’s fell apart. When asked his opinion on why it didn’t work out, Jagger said he believed the two were conflicting personalities who wanted to remain independent from each other.
“That’s hard to make even a stab at because I don’t know John and Paul well enough,” Jagger explained. “I know them slightly, same as you, probably, and maybe you knew John better at the end. I can hazard a guess that they were both rather strong personalities, and both felt they were totally independent. They seemed to be very competitive over leadership of the band.”
Jagger added that he believes leaders must agree on their role, and it seemed like Lennon and McCartney fought for the same position.
“Whereas John and Paul felt they were too strong, and they wanted to be in charge,” Jagger continued. “If there are 10 things, they both wanted to be in charge of nine of them. You’re not gonna make a relationship like that work, are you?”
While the Lennon-McCartney partnership is the most successful songwriting credit ever, it’s hard to say if it’s legitimate because most of their songs were primarily written by one, with a few contributions from the other. Still, both proved they were excellent without the other as they went on to have successful solo careers.
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