The artist Joe Walsh called a national treasure: ‘She’s a great songwriter and a great person’
A national treasure is a person or thing that an entire country holds in high regard. They’re protected and admired as something truly special and precious, handled as rare and deeply important. For Joe Walsh, that label is more than fitting for one artist whose status stretches way beyond the United States and into international treasure status.
“She’s a national treasure. Anything she sings, you immediately know it’s her. If it’s on the radio, you don’t change stations, you listen to it,” the Eagles guitarist told Interview. The artist in question is Stevie Nicks, the beloved singer from Fleetwood Mac and one of the most influential voices in rock music, for both her solo effort and contributions to the band.
Walsh’s relationship with Nicks is a unique one. While music fans look from the outside in, appreciating and agreeing with her status as an important and incredible artists, Walsh gets to be both a fan and a friend of the artist. Still able to see and celebrate her talent as a music lover himself, he has also been privy to the mind behind it all.
He’s been lucky enough to know Nicks on a personal and even a romantic level, getting to know the person behind the music and the processes and creativity that have given the world so much music. To him, his connection to Nicks only makes her status as someone special more secure.
“She’s a great songwriter, a great singer and a great person,” he said, “We spent about a year together, and she helped me write a bunch of music, and I helped her write her music.”
On Nicks’ side, she once deemed Walsh the “great, great love of [her] life”. The two became close when she began working and touring with the Eagles. Having first been connected to Don Henley during the late 1970s, Nicks’ love for the band’s music kept her in their stratosphere. Then, in the 1980s, she found herself on tour with them again and falling for Walsh, inspiring her track ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?’
However, the relationship proved to be too volatile while both musicians were struggling greatly with addiction at the time. “Joe and I broke up because of the coke,” Nicks told Q Magazine, “He told my friend and singer Sharon [Celani], ‘I’m leaving Stevie, because I’m afraid that one of us is going to die. And the other one won’t be able to save the other person, because our cocaine habit has become so over the top now that neither of us can live through this. So the only way to save both of us is for me to leave.’”
But as with so many of Nicks’ connections, personal drama never got in the way of musical admiration. Just as how she managed to survive being in Fleetwood Mac and still creating with her ex-partner Lindsey Buckingham, it’s clear that her love of music trumps the ups and downs of her love life. Instead, a personal connection to the mind behind the music only seems to make her love for the music even deeper as her admiration for the likes of Prince, Tom Petty, and seemingly the Eagles was only heightened when there was also a friendship there between herself and the artist.
Walsh seems to operate similarly: Even long after their brief romantic connection is gone, their reverence for one another’s work and an enduring friendship remain. “Romantically, it shifted, but in terms of friends and respect for each other, that’s all still there,” he said, “She’s really a great person. Anybody who knows her will tell you that.”
