“I could never explain it”: the one lyric Stevie Nicks said she would have never written
Stevie Nicks wasn’t going to be comfortable singing anything she didn’t believe in when she was onstage.
She may have been the mystical member of Fleetwood Mac, but even when the gold dust had settled, the most important part of her job was knowing that she had laid her soul bare in every single one of her songs. Her lyrics were almost like private confessionals that she would share with the audience every single night, but there were more than a few songs that didn’t roll off the tongue like they were supposed to whenever she walked into the studio.
Then again, Nicks would have probably wanted to veto half of the lyrics she was singing with Lindsey Buckingham if she had anything to say about it on Rumours. The entire album was a document of everyone’s relationships falling apart, and even if Nicks was willing to take the high road, there’s a good chance that she would have rather stormed out of the studio than have to sing backing vocals on a song like ‘Go Your Own Way’.
She wasn’t ready for that kind of hostility in the room, but Tusk seemed to be even worse by comparison. The fallout of everyone’s breakup was still heavy in the air, but even if Buckingham had admittedly cooled when it came to the lyrical front, it’s not like every one of their songs was completely smooth sailing. Nicks already had a massive problem with the lyrics to the title track, and since she was only getting a few songs on the album anyway, it made a lot more sense to get her solo career underway.
There was never any plan to leave Fleetwood Mac or anything, but Nicks seemed to have a lot more potential as a solo artist than having to split the songs three different ways in her band. But even when she was working with some of the best songwriters that she had ever heard, not everything that she sang was going to fit with her voice every single time.
Tom Petty’s ‘Insider’ was already too pretty to be one of her tunes, and while the heartland rocker seemed to understand Nicks a lot better than anyone else, she did end up looking for a few fresh faces when working on Timespace. Bret Michaels was definitely a strange choice when working on his song for her greatest hits album, but when Jon Bon Jovi came in with the song ‘Sometimes It’s a Bitch’, Nicks was originally hesitant to make a song that had profanity in it.
‘The Gold Dust Woman’ had no problem with swearing in real life, but she felt that shoehorning a few swear words into her songs wasn’t really her way of working, saying, “Jon played me his song, and I said, ‘I’m going to have to interpret this to sing this.’ I wasn’t nuts about saying, ‘Sometimes it’s a bitch, sometimes it’s a breeze,’ because I’ve never sort of sworn in a song before. And his generation cannot possibly understand what my life has been like since 1974 with Fleetwood Mac, and I could never explain it to anybody.”
That sounds a lot more prudish than it actually is, but you have to understand where Nicks was coming from. She looked at her songs like her musical children, and she wasn’t about to let someone make a song that threw in a bunch of swear words to sound edgy and dangerous. Her music had to be an extension of herself, so if she was singing those lyrics, she would need to inhabit a character that would be able to make those lyrics roll off the tongue a little better.
It might have been a small hurdle in the grand scheme of things, but Nicks wasn’t about to let any one of her songs go to waste – she knew that every tune she sang had to come from the heart, and even if not every one of her lyrics worked, she was going to find a way to make them sound effortless regardless.
