The 2001 album Stevie Nicks thought would be her last: “A really bad moment”
Stevie Nicks didn’t like to think of her music as staying stagnant for too long.
The mark of any good artist is to keep their music going for as long as they can, and even if Nicks has had lulls in her career now and again, she wanted to inhabit a song like ‘Rhiannon’ every night like it was the first time she ever sang it. That might be easier said than done a lot of the time, but Nicks remembered feeling heartbroken when she thought that her recording career was finished before she wanted it to end.
Then again, all artists should really have the final say on when they want to quit. There are plenty of artists who have continued to perform until they dropped, like David Bowie or Freddie Mercury, but there’s nothing wrong with taking the same approach that Phil Collins and Linda Ronstadt did, either. They knew their strengths as performers, and they never wanted to sell the audience short whenever they were making one of their new records, either.
But Nicks is the kind of musical force that no one can really stop. She was never going to sound the same way she did when she made Rumours for the first time or anything, but even when working on The Dance with Fleetwood Mac, you could hear her putting more emotion into ‘Silver Springs’ than she ever had before. She knew that her music could still hit like a sledgehammer, but it took a lot of hard years of drug abuse for her to pull herself out of her own musical haze.
Street Angel was nothing but her spinning her wheels, and when she got out of rehab, Trouble in Shangri-La was the kind of musical sunshine that she needed to make. Her entire career felt like it was becoming way too boring, and this was a reminder of the magic that she had all the way back in the days of Bella Donna. But there were also more than a few times where she hit stumbling blocks before making her next record.
All the pieces were set up for her to make a great solo record after she returned to ‘The Mac’ for Say You Will, but even with Dave Stewart in tow, Nicks got stopped before she could even walk into the studio, saying, “I was going to make a record. I really got very depressed feedback from everyone in the business around me, which was like, ‘You know what, the business is so screwed up that really, right now, you just shouldn’t bother.’ It wasn’t just my manager, it was everybody. It was like I’d tripped and fallen down the stairs. It was a really bad moment in my life.”
But since when has telling an artist what to do stopped them? The business may have been leaning on Nicks to become a legacy act, but with someone like Stewart working with her, she wasn’t trying to simply make another record. She wanted to create the kind of album that would have put every single one of her previous albums to shame, and In Your Dreams certainly holds its own.
While the album does contain a few faint whiffs of her Fleetwood Mac days on the title track, there are also tunes that have their own sonic character. ‘Soldier’s Angel’ will forever be one of her most gripping ballads, and Stewart brings his signature touch to almost every track on the record, whether that’s giving the production a kick in the ass or lending his voice to tunes like ‘Cheaper Than Free’.
The rest of the world may not have wanted her to make this record, but Nicks had no interest in cowering to what the digital age wanted out of her. She wanted to make music for herself more than anything, and no business type was going to tell her that she couldn’t do whatever she wanted when she walked into the studio.
