Bright Lights, Big City

Richards' version

Rolling Stone's Kory Grow compared the two. Reed took the song at a medium tempo with a swinging guitar line, a slurred, trembling vocal and a searing harmonica solo. Richards plays the guitar harder, sings with what Grow called "a Mississippi-via-Dartford drawl", and drops the harmonica, playing it straight to the fade. No details came with it about when or where Richards recorded it. It is not his first time with the song either: the Rolling Stones recorded it in 1963, Noise11 notes.

An old song on a new album

Rockstar and Atlantic describe the album as 34 original tracks. In this case "original" means recorded for the album, not newly written. It is the oldest song we know of for GTA 6, first recorded 15 years before the oldest songs in the Extended Look. Pitchfork's reviewer joked that Richards is there "for the suburbanites who moved there in retirement", a nod to Florida's reputation as a place people go to retire.

A song about a big city

A song about being bowled over by a city's bright lights suits a game whose main city is called Vice. The lyric's couple, overwhelmed by the big city, is not far from Jason and Lucia either.

Our take: putting a 65-year-old blues song next to Travis Scott and Morgan Wallen shows how wide Rockstar is casting, and it matches the Extended Look, which jumped from 2023 rap to 1976 soft rock in minutes. We do not expect a blues station built around one cover, but this track could easily sit on a classic rock station if GTA 6 has one. That is a guess; Rockstar has named no stations, and we will update this page at launch.