The one album that brought Stevie Nicks back to music: “What I really wanted to say”
The biggest gift that Stevie Nicks ever gave to the world was putting her artistic soul down on vinyl.
Anyone could have spent their time trying to make every one of their songs the best they could, but while Lindsey Buckingham was trying to get the right take, Nicks knew that nothing could have been better than her finding the right attitude in one of her performances. But that kind of sensation is a certain magic that most people don’t realise they have until it’s almost gone forever.
And if you look at the back half of Nicks’s career, she has gone through more than her fair share of turmoil throughout her life. There’s no sense in rehashing the same drama that birthed Rumours into the world, but even when she was far from happy during the making of albums like Tusk, she at least knew she could rely on her knack for melody to see her through the worst moments. Say what you will about Buckingham’s more adventurous side, but even he could admit that ‘Sara’ was one of the band’s finest songs.
But when she started working on her solo career in tandem with the band, things were bound to get a little bit ugly. There was no way for her to hide the massive amount of cocaine that she was ingesting all the time, but even when she got clean, she ended up substituting one bad habit for another when she got hooked on Klonopin. She had already had her falling-outs with Buckingham, but when he was out of the picture, even her solo records like Street Angel managed to have a weak shelf life.
Projects like The Dance may have reminded everybody of why Fleetwood Mac was so magical back in the day, but if Nicks wanted to make new music, she needed to make sure one thing was crystal clear: she needed to clean up, and while there were already a million reasons for her to walk away from the drugs, when someone comes up for air after that long, it can be scary picking everything back up.
After all, when someone spends their entire creative life on drugs, it can be hard to separate themselves from being that way all the time. Outside of not needing a hit of anything anymore, Nicks was wondering if she even had it in her to make another record, but by the time she began work on Trouble in Shangri-La, fans were finally introduced to the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ all over again.
It had been a long time, but this was the first album where Nicks felt like she could finally regain her artistry again, saying, “I went to rehab, came out, went to Phoenix and started writing the songs for Trouble in Shangri-La. Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I’m back to being the poet I always thought I was. For a long time, I was terrified that I had lost that. I’m so delighted with the fact that I’m OK, and that this record really tells everybody that I’m OK.”
And listening to the record, there’s a lot of that old mystical energy present in all of those tracks. While she may have needed to rely on some of her famous friends like Tom Petty and Don Henley in the background, this was her getting together with a bunch of her best collaborators and coming out with something that is as authentic a Stevie Nicks record as she could have possibly made by that time.
But Trouble in Shangri-La wasn’t about making the sound of a long-lost classic from 1976. This was what Nicks was sounding like in the modern age, and even if she didn’t have the same kind of youthful energy she had back in the day, she had the wisdom of a woman who had been around for years and seen a lot more of the world than most people dare to see.
