The 1985 lyric that defined Stevie Nicks: “That’s kind of what my life is”
Even by Stevie Nicks’ intensely personal standards, one song cut closer to the bone than the rest. As it happens, cutting close to the bone is her forte.
While the purpose of songwriting differs from person to person, with many stars of rock and pop arguing their own reasons for wanting to pen a song, lots of them will argue that they’re attempting to process something that’s happened in their life and offer a slice of their own personal experience.
Of course, there are some who would prefer to keep the more personal aspects of their life shielded from the public eye, and therefore, they’ll attempt to convey their thoughts in cryptic or clandestine ways. Others will avoid the possibility of listeners even being able to attempt to decipher their lyrics at all by refusing to write from a personal perspective, either adopting a persona who is impossible to connect to the real-world individual behind the song, or outright avoiding any personal subject matter.
However, for those who do choose to write music that is deeply personal to them, it can often lead to there being an emotionally resonant moment afterwards, where you realise that you’ve successfully managed to convey a message you’ve been wanting to get off your chest for your entire life.
Some personal events or situations can take a long time to process, and while you may have spent the vast majority of your career trying to express exactly how you feel about any given thing, the words don’t always come to you naturally or in a fashion that feels worthy of summing up what’s going on for you internally.
In the case of Stevie Nicks, who was a prolific songwriter during her tenure with Fleetwood Mac and also in her own solo career, she often found herself touching on personal matters, particularly focusing on her romantic relationships and the effects that it was having both on her and the interpersonal dynamic between the brooding bandmates.
However, it was the title track from her 1985 solo album, Rock A Little, that she once proclaimed had lyrics so personal to her that they ended up defining her both as a person and an artist.
Around the time of the song’s release, Nicks proclaimed in an interview that the lyrics to ‘Rock A Little (Go Ahead Lily)’ came to her after she’d received a lecture from her father, and she used this experience to weave a message to herself into the track’s narrative. “There’s this one part that is about my dad,” she said, referring to the lines: “He knows his daughter / They say where does she live / He says, oh, up there somewhere / And then he says go ahead Lily, hit it, hit the stage.”
“That’s kind of what my life is.”
Stevie Nicks
Of course, on the surface of things, this doesn’t appear to be in any way related to Nicks given how it refers to a character by the name of Lily, but even in her decision to obfuscate her own identity within the song by referring to herself by a nickname that only those close to her used, there is a definite element of her identity in the song.
Around 1985, Nicks had found herself at something of a crossroads creatively and in her personal life, with Fleetwood Mac entering a hiatus after their 1982 album, Mirage, and with her separation from producer Jimmy Iovine. Her first attempt at recording her third album was scrapped entirely. Her confidence was shot away due to her solo career not having as many highs as she may have hoped for up until this moment, and it only flooded back after these words of encouragement to return to what she did best: performing.
Nicks had used this lack of self-belief as an excuse for shying away, but with the pep-talk she received from her father, referenced in these lines from ‘Rock A Little’, she was able to come to terms with what she needed to do in order to regain that inner strength.
For Nicks, this captured her dual existence. “That’s kind of what my life is. I had to make a lot of changes and stops and understand what was going on in my life,“ she said of her tempestuous showbiz journey to that point. “That was other people influencing me and talking to me, making me feel certain ways that maybe I let my own self go a little bit and not rely on my own intuitions, which are always the best ones for me, and I’m always right.”
It may have been hard for her to come to terms with putting something so personal to her in a song, but considering it was evidently something she’d been trying to express for her entire career, it’s hardly surprising that she believed the end result was a song that was able to define her whole career.
