“A grand sound”: The hit song Stevie Nicks cut in one take
Stevie Nicks always had more talent than most, but the nature of the business—and the fact that she is a woman—meant that she has always had to work twice as hard as some of her contemporaries. With the passage of time, however, Nicks has become one of the most prominent figures in rock whose popularity remains strong, even after over five decades of occupying the spotlight.
Going back a hefty handful of years to the early 1980s, after Nicks had just finished touring with Fleetwood Mac for the Mirage tour, embarking on a set of new pastures following the death of her friend, Robin Anderson, left her feeling somewhat energised about the possibilities of life and a career in the spotlight. Unlike some of Nicks’ most challenging eras, recording The Wild Heart opened her heart up to more beauty than she could have ever imagined.
The Wild Heart had already generated a whirlwind of audience interest due to its involvement of many high-profile musicians, like Tom Petty, Steve Lukather, Prince, and Mick Fleetwood, along with Nicks’ team of coveted industry figures, like Sandy Stewart, Paul Buckmaster, and Petty’s band The Heartbreakers, who performed on the album’s hit track ‘I Will Run To You’.
One of the standouts on the entire album was the lead single ‘Stand Back’, which also became a staple of Nicks’ live shows and a part of Fleetwood Mac’s from the late 1980s. Nicks wrote the song on the day of her marriage to Kim Anderson, when she heard Prince’s ‘Little Red Corette’ playing on the radio. The synthesizers in the song ended up playing an integral part in ‘Stand Back’, in which Prince came into the studio to play for the song before swiftly leaving “as if the whole thing happened in a dream,” according to Nicks.
Aside from Prince’s involvement, one aspect of recording the song that made it flow effortlessly was working with Jimmy Iovine, who Nicks once told MTV was the one person who “pulled me out of the depths of darkness”. In the studio, the musician recalled him having the endearing ability to give songs “a grand sound” like ‘Because the Night’, which she had become endeared to ever since she first heard it.
After she had performed the vocals for the track and Sandy Stewart played the drum machine, the song was cut in one take, following which “we never did it again.” Although some of her songs involved recording vocals more than once, she felt The Wild Heart was different, mostly because of the experience of recording the songs in the studio.
In fact, the process felt so magical that Nicks felt the urge to immortalise it on film so that she could go back and revisit it all whenever she wanted. In her own words: “I feel there’s no way to redo the vocal on The Wild Heart, so why bother? And we have a lot of fun recording because of that. Everybody gets dressed up, and we video it. It’s…wild!”
