The classic album Stevie Nicks was terrified to release: “I was worried”
No artist is safe from getting cold feet when making a record. It’s one thing to believe in a song if you’re just sitting at your guitar or piano at home, but once that same music enters the studio, you’re liable to tinker with it for hours until it’s even close to what it was in your head. It’s easy to imagine that feeling fades away when artists have a few classics under their belt, but Stevie Nicks was still terrified to release Bella Donna in the early 1980s.
But before we get into Nicks’s solo career, we have to see how she fits into her role in Fleetwood Mac. She had already shown promise when working as a duo with Lindsey Buckingham, but having a full band behind her on songs like ‘Rhiannon’ took her compositions from gentle songs into spiritual exercises half the time.
More than anything, there seemed to be an aura surrounding Nicks every time she took to the stage. Since many of her songs centred around the spiritual side of music, there were even claims that she may have been a witch behind the scenes.
But really, could a witch have made something as human as ‘Dreams’? Regardless of her spiritual power over the audience, most of her songs were about the darker side of humanity, whether that meant worrying about saying goodbye to an unborn child on songs like ‘Sara’ or dedicating songs to her mother like the B-side ‘Silver Springs’.
Although that kind of music worked just fine in Fleetwood Mac, Nicks knew that she needed to get another outlet rather than just her band. After all, if she kept her song count to just two or three per album like everyone else, she was bound to stockpile her songs just like other unsung heroes like George Harrison had done when other artists took up more of the spotlight.
Once she did get the chance to fly on her own, though, Nicks was initially scared to even release anything, telling NPR, “No one [was] self-indulgent at all. Because it was the first record of my solo career, so I was worried. I was terrified that was going to tank. So we wasted no time. So when we went into the studio with Jimmy Iovine, we were so ready to make that record. Just like we were with Fleetwood Mac. So it just goes to show you what you can do if you want to do that.”
While it’s easy to just look at Nicks’s solo debut as an extension of what she had done in Fleetwood Mac, that would be selling it painfully short. Because outside of her voice, there are a lot of songs on the album that wouldn’t quite fit her other group’s aesthetic. ‘Leather and Lace’ could have been a half-decent duet in her old group, but there was no way that Buckingham was going to pull off something like ‘Edge of Seventeen’.
After spending the first half of her career with help from her fellow musicians, this was the first time Nicks got to prove herself as a songwriter independent of her bandmates. She may have sold the role of an old Welsh witch whenever she played live, but there was a different spiritual energy the minute she wrote songs like ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
