“I missed my chance”: The 1985 song that made Stevie Nicks furious
Many of the best songs Stevie Nicks ever wrote usually involved being in the right place at the right time.
No one can simply make a classic song just by sitting and playing their instruments and waiting for the moment to strike, so the best thing that anyone could hope for is that they are within reach of a microphone and a demo recorder when the inspiration strikes for the first time. Sometimes it’s hard to get the right basis for what a song should be, but Nicks at least took comfort in knowing that she had some of the best session musicians in the world working with her throughout her solo career.
It was going to take a lot for anyone to fill the hole that the other members of Fleetwood Mac took up in Nicks’s music, but getting people like Tom Petty and Waddy Wachtel for Bella Donna was already a step in the right direction. She fully admitted she didn’t have the best knowledge of what chords are in her songs, so it was better to have someone else there to help translate what she was trying to articulate on guitar or piano.
But even when she was making classics, there was no one there to truly fill out Lindsey Buckingham’s role. He was a perfectionist in every sense of the word when he worked on his own songs with ‘The Mac’, and while he did have some trouble trying to help Nicks out on songs that he didn’t like, he could at least understand that his way with melody could at least make her songs better. She didn’t really have that confidante anymore, but all of that changed when Dave Stewart walked in the studio.
While Nicks had known Stewart for a while as the beard in Eurythmics, In Your Dreams was the first time where their partnership truly came together. This was the kind of musical translator that Nicks had been waiting for for a while, and despite having someone there who actually seemed to understand what she wanted, she did admit that not everything got off to a great start when they first met back in the 1980s.
She was already trying to put together tunes for her second solo album, and while Stewart did have a knockout hook for her, Nicks was more than a little bit pissed when Tom Petty turned the song into ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, saying, “We’d met a long time ago. He sent me his song ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ but it ended up being Tom Petty’s. I missed my chance with that song and I was furious but I understood that was destiny.” If you think about it, though, Petty did something with that song that no one else could have done.
Admittedly, the music video does read like something that Nicks would have done with the Alice in Wonderland-style trip that everyone goes on, but getting the drum machine going and Petty delivering the lyrics like a musical Mad Hatter is the perfect combination. It didn’t necessarily work with his idea for the album Southern Accents, but Nicks did get her revenge slightly when working on one of her own tunes.
While she accidentally lifted one of her ideas from the demo of Petty’s song ‘Runaway Trains’, ‘Ooh My Love’ is a much better song to lay over top of that track. Petty was a master of many different styles of writing, but having something this shimmering and pretty on an album like Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) made for a much more jarring listening experience than if it were put on Nicks’s record.
Stewart and Nicks did eventually end up having the perfect kind of creative relationship, but the reason why she cherishes it so much now is that she realised what could happen if she didn’t. Some of the best songs can slip away in an instant, and she didn’t want to see a masterpiece slip right through her fingers all over again.
