Songfacts®:

• "Driving Too Hard" centers around a strained relationship. Mick Jagger yowls and growls about feeling pressured and controlled by his romantic partner. Then Keith Richards unleashes a gnarled guitar solo that shreds through the tension.
• This country-rock lament was the last song written and finished for Hackney Diamonds. "We found this in some of the previous sessions, but it wasn't finished," Jagger recalled to Uncut magazine. "And so we kind of revived the riff and idea and then Keith and I finished it in the studio late in the day. So that was good fun doing it."
• The Stones originally demoed "Driving Too Hard" with the late Charlie Watts, but it wasn't a good take so Jagger suggested they redo the song. Jagger and Richards then finished off the lyrics together in the Bahamas, sitting down on the floor with a piece of paper while producer Andrew Watt sat with them as a buffer, playing guitar.
  
  "Those guys just bounced back and forth making each other crack up laughing, and they wrote these lyrics sitting next to each other, truly together," Watt told Rolling Stone. "Mick sang it 30 minutes after that, and Keith did the backgrounds. It was so special to watch - like, folklore-level Jagger-Richards."
• Ronnie Wood envisions playing this at the Grand Ole Opry at Nashville. "I'm using the B-Bender pedal steel guitar, which gets the sad yearning sound that is at the heart of all good country music," he said.