The one band Stevie Nicks would join in a heartbeat: “My favourite”
For all of the problems that Fleetwood Mac had, Stevie Nicks was always going to be faithful to her band.
She was never going to be known as the schmuck that broke up the band when Rumours started to test everyone’s patience, and even if there was room for her to grow as a solo artist, she wanted to keep the band as one of her top priorities all the time. But by the time that she broke free from the band, she did have a lot more bands that seemed to fit better with what she was trying to do.
Because when you look at Nicks’s approach to music, she wasn’t going to go along with Lindsey Buckingham for the rest of her life. He was looking to make the perfect production every single time he made one of their records, but her songs were about something less tangible. Her tunes didn’t need to make the most sense, but it only mattered whether the music felt right when she listened back to it.
And when she started off her solo career, Bella Donna needed to be right. If she was going to go solo, she needed to have a bit more muscle behind what she was doing. She had already fallen in love with everything Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had been doing, and having them on her debut record was the perfect way of differentiating herself from the gigantic band behind her.
But when looking through her later records, she didn’t want to be defined by everything that Petty was supposed to do. She had her own identity, and when looking through a lot of her later records, you could hear her trying out different spaces within her own voice. She wasn’t afraid to work with some of the biggest names in music around that time, but when the country music boom started happening in the 1990s, she felt that The Chicks were one of the finest acts she had ever heard.
The biggest names in Nashville were already starting to become huge, but when looking through The Chicks’ discography, they almost had a Crosby, Stills and Nash vibe to the way that they sang together. Natalie Maines had a lot more on her mind than the typical puppy love that every other country singer was about, and Nicks felt that she could have fit right in if she had the chance to harmonise with them.
Compared to the harmonies that ‘The Mac’ had on all of their records, Nicks felt that there was a lot more room to grow with someone like Maines behind her, saying, “Natalie Maines is my favourite person to sing with, ever. I could happily be a part of The Chicks. Even though they’re billed as country artists, they’re very rock ‘n’ roll.”
And considering what The Chicks had been known for, they were practically Nicks’s musical daughters anyway. ‘Wide Open Spaces’ and ‘Cowboy Take Me Away’ could have easily been made with a few Nicks touches back in the day, and given their pitch-perfect version of ‘Landslide’, they were poised to be one of the biggest names in music history had some narrow-minded idiots not tried to silence them for having the gall to actually have an opinion in America.
That kind of treatment wasn’t what they deserved by any means, but a song like ‘I’m Not Ready to Make Nice’ is even further proof that they belonged in the same category as Nicks. They were willing to do anything and everything to become the biggest names in music, and nothing was going to stop them from making the music that they wanted to make. They were still country, but their mentality was rock and roll as all hell.
