Songfacts®:

• "As Tears Go By" is the debut single by Marianne Faithfull, released in the United Kingdom in 1964 when she was 17 years old. The song was written by a then-reluctant songwriting duo, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They were prodded into penning something original by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who'd been inspired by Brian Epstein telling John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write songs for other artists.
  
  "I first met Marianne at a party," Loog Oldham recalled to Uncut magazine. "She had an acoustic guitar and was sitting on a radiator looking extraordinary. I went up to her and said, 'Can you sing?' She said, 'sort of.' That was enough. I told her to meet me at Olympic the following week. That was an era when you could record your friends, and you never recorded anybody you didn't like."
  
  According to Loog Oldham, they had to get funding from Oliver! composer Lionel Bart to make the session happen. The deal was, Marianne would record one of Bart's songs too, but the song in question, "I Don't Know (How to Tell You)," turned out to be a dud. Faithfull gamely recorded it but everyone quickly agreed it was dreadful. "Luckily we had as 'Tears Go By,'" Loog Oldham said. "That was natural for her, a beautiful question of opposites."
• The song's lyrics reflect a sense of melancholy and nostalgia, with 17-year-old Faithfull observing the world around her - children playing, rain falling - and feeling emotionally distant, "watching as tears go by." It is the sound of a curtain being quietly drawn on childhood.
• Mike Leander's arrangement features a distinctive English horn line and strings, contributing to its baroque pop sound.
• Jimmy Page, then a prolific session musician still a few years away from joining the Yardbirds and co-founding Led Zeppelin, played the 12-string acoustic guitar.
• The song climbed to #9 in both the UK and Irish charts, and #22 in the US, launching Faithfull into the limelight. Despite its success, Faithfull later expressed ambivalence about the song, stating she "was never that crazy about 'As Tears Go By'" but acknowledged it fit her perfectly at the time. Faithfull revisited it several times over the years, her voice deepening and weathering with each version.
• The Rolling Stones released their own version in 1965, which also became a hit, but Faithfull's original remains closely associated with her image as a 1960s icon and later as an artist of hard-earned wisdom.