The 2011 song Stevie Nicks called one of her greatest: “This may be the best”
Any song that Stevie Nicks ever worked on wasn’t supposed to be about getting the greatest vocal take of all time.
She was after music that had some passion behind everything she sang, and even if she wasn’t always trying to reinvent the wheel with her singing by any means, you could tell that she was always trying to bring that little extra bit of emotion across every single time that she spoke her truth in her tunes. And while some of her songs are going to be remembered forever for a good reason, she knew that her finest work might be the ones that fans need to do a little extra digging to find.
Because not every song that comes out as a single has to be one of the greatest tunes of all time. A song being catchy doesn’t equate it to being good, just ask Billy Joel, but when you look at the tunes that Nicks has sent up the charts, it’s not like they are watered-down versions of what she does either. ‘Landslide’ has the same kind of power as anything else that she had done in Fleetwood Mac, but if she wanted to take her music to the next level, she was always going to need a partner in crime behind the scenes.
And it’s not like she didn’t have a fair bit of help in her old band. Lindsey Buckingham was the one helping to flesh out a bunch of her tunes whenever she made something new, and even when working in her solo career, having people like Tom Petty around to give her some tunes or Prince collaborating with her to give her the idea of ‘Stand Back’ was practically a godsend for her after hearing ‘Little Red Corvette’.
But after years of working with Buckingham off and on, she finally had a stable writing partner when she reached the 2010s. She needed to prove to the world that she could make a great album on her own when she made Trouble in Shangri-La, but compared to everything else that she was working on with ‘The Mac,’ Dave Stewart seemed to have that sixth sense for what she wanted out of her tunes most of the time.
Which shouldn’t be all that surprising. For everyone who remembered Stewart as being the beard with glasses in Eurythmics, a lot of what he was doing was trying to decorate the beautiful voice that he was working with. And since Annie Lennox was hard at work with her own solo career at that point, working on tunes like ‘Cheaper Than Free’ gave Nicks the same kind of feeling that she figured every great partnership was supposed to have.
This was her Lennon/McCartney moment, and working on that song was her chance to prove to the world that she could still make something as strong as her classics, saying, “I believe in my heart that that song will live on forever. I said to everybody, ‘We have to really treat this song with kid gloves, because this may be the best song that Dave Stewart and Stevie Nicks ever does.’” But a lot of the power of the song comes down to the way that both of them sing their parts.
You can try your hand at making the best-produced record of all time, but this is one of the few instances where Nicks seemed to capture a moment in time on her record. No one would have blamed her if she wanted to make the same kind of song every single time she made a new album, but having Stewart’s production and voice behind her was her being just as willing to mix things up and try some new spaces within her usual sound.
There were plenty of people who were waiting for her to tour by this point, but in the grand scheme of things, Nicks knew that her career was about more than what she did onstage. It was about making music that people could feel in their chest, and every single one of these experiments was one step closer to her figuring out the kind of artist that she wanted to be.
