Best and Worst Solo Album From Every Member of the Rolling Stones

When you are a member of a long-running band, the decision to make solo music outside of said band comes with its share pros and cons. Not everyone sees it the same way.

“If you’ve been in a band for 40 years, I think you should be doing a lot of work on your own, as well,” Mick Jagger said to NPR in 2007, the same year he released a compilation of his solo work called The Very Best of Mick Jagger. “You get a certain amount of freedom if you do a solo record which you don’t really have if you’re in a band.”

Jagger’s partner in songwriting in the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards, evidently has always felt differently about branching off from his main group.

“It’s kind of strange, because it was never in the cards for me,” he explained to Rolling Stone back in 1988, speaking about the release of his very first solo album, Talk Is Cheap. “It was not something I wanted to do. Also, in the back of my mind, doing a solo record meant a slight sense of failure. The only reason I would do a solo album was because I couldn’t keep the Stones together.”

Of course, the Stones very much stayed together after that, and both Jagger and Richards have continued to release solo music. In the below gallery, we’ve selected what we feel to be the strongest and weakest releases from each of the core members of the Rolling Stones, past and present: Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood and Mick Taylor.