She's a Rainbow

"She's a Rainbow" is the Rolling Stones at their most uncharacteristically tender and psychedelic, a baroque-pop jewel from 1967's Their Satanic Majesties Request. Built around Nicky Hopkins' cascading, almost music-box piano figure and adorned with a string arrangement by a young John Paul Jones, it trades the band's usual swagger for childlike wonder. Mick Jagger's vocal is uncharacteristically sweet, painting a woman in synesthetic color — "comes in colours everywhere" — a celebration of feminine beauty rendered as pure chromatic delight. The production is lush and slightly chaotic, in keeping with the album's much-maligned Sgt. Pepper-chasing experimentation, but the song itself is irresistible, its piano hook one of the era's most enchanting. There's a tension between the Stones' bad-boy reputation and this burst of flower-power sincerity that makes it disarming. It captures the brief Summer of Love window when even the darkest band wanted to paint with light. Decades later it's found new homes in films and ads, its innocence perennial. Play it on a bright morning, or whenever you want to see someone you love refracted through prisms — it's a song that insists beauty can be celebrated without irony, just this once.