Songfacts®:

• This piano-led ballad was an instrumental backing track languishing in the Rolling Stones' archives, but was pulled from the band's vault and re-recorded with an entirely new lyric for release on the 2010 update of their 1972 album, Exile on Main St..
• Jagger said to The Sunday Times May 9, 2010 of the Nicky Hopkins original piano-led track: "I've always liked it, but I never quite knew what was going to happen to it."
  In another interview, Jagger added: "It's a good feeling when it all comes together. There's a track called 'Following the River,' which is a ballad. It's a got beautiful piano on it, which I didn't play. And I'd heard this before but it didn't have any lyrics at all. I could hear different melodies but I didn't know how I was going to get the melody to fit with this already existing track, which is very heavily piano. And when it came together, I was just singing onto it, I was putting it on the stereo and I was singing along, trying out different melody lines and trying out different words. And when it actually came together, it's a very good moment, you know? There's a moment - there's a frustration, there's a build-up of this [makes discouraged face], and then try, try, try, try, and there's a moment when it really comes together for you." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France