“A great vocal”: the 1985 song Stevie Nicks knew she couldn’t compete with
When someone gets to the stage of being a rock god, it’s hard to argue with the benchmark they set for themselves. Success might be great in the moment, but it gets very tiring, realising that someone needs to go into the studio and outdo what they made before.
Although Stevie Nicks could summon up that witchy atmosphere that made her a star whenever she wanted to, she had enough foresight to realise when she had pushed herself to her limit and couldn’t give anything else.
Listening back to some of Fleetwood Mac’s best moments, there’s hardly a second where Nicks isn’t giving 100% every time she’s sitting at the microphone. That passion pretty much launched the band’s second chapter, in fact.
But there’s also an argument that Nicks took the brunt of the load for the band. Most of her greatest vocal performances came from a personal place, and when she inhabits a witch talking about the dangers of drugs on ‘Gold Dust Woman’, she practically sounds like a banshee calling from the great beyond while she sings.
Even in her solo career, some of her best moments came from her leaving all of it on the table for her audience. She had already gone through the trouble of having to lose one of her best friends, but still having the strength to comfort Joe Walsh after he lost his daughter on ‘Has Anyone Written Anything For You’ is still one of the most heartfelt moments that anyone has set a melody to.
But for all of the spiritual moments she had in her music, Nicks still claimed she couldn’t hold a candle to what her friend Tom Petty had been doing. Even though he didn’t have the same witchy demeanour as she did, his blend of bluesy rock and heartland spirit was everything that Nicks wanted to be, to the point where she even asked him to be an honorary Heartbreaker while she was still in Fleetwood Mac.
So when Petty started writing songs for her like ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, it was a match made in heaven when they turned it into a duet and their voices blended together. Every artist has that moment where they need a break, and when Petty came up for air after writing ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More,’ Nicks admitted defeat when she heard him singing on the demo.
While Petty had helped finish off the tune with Dave Stewart, Nicks thought it was an absolute joke to try to match what he did, saying, “The whole song was written. [But] Tom had done a great vocal, a great vocal.”
Nicks was floored by it and fell on her sword. “I just looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to top that? Really?’. I got up, thanked Dave, thanked Tom, fired [producer] Jimmy [Iovine] and left. That all went down in about five minutes,” she recalled. She was neither crestfallen nor inspired, she was simply defeated by Petty’s purring take.
Even if Nicks had to work things out on her own at that point, it’s not like she couldn’t hold her own. ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ may have had the spirit of Nicks written all over it, but was it really going to have the same passion that she gave to tunes like ‘Talk To Me’ or ‘I Can’t Wait’ if she simply tried to match what Petty had already done?
Nicks did at least get the chance to sing backing vocals on the final track, but the final version belonged to Petty all along. Many people can try to capture his signature rasp, but no one was going to have the same Alice in Wonderland atmosphere to their vocal performance that Petty did when singing it.
The song quickly rose to 13th in the US charts. Now, it is pretty much remembered as Petty’s signature tune. The minimalism of the song’s melody is perfectly filled in by the charming nuance of his unique voice. Perhaps it’s not that Nicks knew she couldn’t compete with the prowess, but rather that she felt it was inherently married to Petty’s singular mysticism all along.
