The 1996 song Stevie Nicks thought everyone threw away: “Never get heard”
Stevie Nicks never wanted any of her songs to ever get left behind.
She put her heart and soul into every single record that she ever made, and even when she could tell when some of them weren’t up to snuff, she knew when she was making music that was going to last long after she was gone. So when some of her songs ended up getting shelved or thrown out for the hell of it, she was going to do everything that she could to dig them out of the vaults and give them a fair shot.
Someone of Nicks’ calibre shouldn’t have had to worry about this problem, but when ‘Silver Springs’ ends up getting demoted from an album, you can see where she’s coming from. She had written one of the best songs to ever bear the name ‘Fleetwood Mac’, and if it was finally put out on a B-side, Nicks was doing everything she could to let everyone know what they missed out on. She was sitting on musical gold, which is probably half the reason why she had a solo career at all.
She didn’t want to spend her entire career waiting for the hopes that the band would take a liking to her songs, and when Bella Donna dropped, everyone got a better idea of the kind of songwriter she always was. Lindsey Buckingham was the one helping her flesh out a lot of her songs on her records, but when left to her own devices, she could let her music sprawl out a little bit more without having to worry about how long her songs were.
But there’s only so many times that someone can make records before they start to hit a wall, and Street Angel was the moment where she realised something was wrong. Of all the records that she ever released, this is the only one that would be considered phoned in, but she did manage to get one major hit out of the deal. There was only one problem, though: it was thrown onto a movie soundtrack.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Some of the greatest songs of all time originated in movie soundtracks, but it was clear that Twister wasn’t going to do for Nicks what Purple Rain had done for Prince. This was the typical 1990s action movie with a hodgepodge of different artists thrown on top of it, and while it does have the distinction of having the song that ended Van Halen in it, Nicks felt that her tune always deserved better.
This was the moment that she was coming back together with Buckingham, and when looking through her back catalogue, Nicks knew that she needed to include the tune on Songs From the Vault to give it a fair shake, saying, “When songs go into movies, you might as well dump them out of the window as you’re driving by because they never get heard.” Which is a shame, because the song itself is actually pretty damn good.
Considering this was in between the band reforming for The Dance, Nicks does have the same kind of energy that she had during that performance. She wasn’t fully on the road to recovery just yet, but with lyrics that are based around hearing demons outside and getting swept up in a whirlwind of chaos, it’s not like it didn’t fit what Nicks was going through after coming out of her Klonopin haze.
It would take another album before she fully put everything back together, but the reason why ‘Twisted’ exists is to be a building block towards trouble in Trouble in Shangrila. The hard times hadn’t ended yet, but as long as she had songs like this, she was willing to take on whatever problems that she had next.
