The one singer that Stevie Nicks said had “everything”
Finding that one perfect musical soul is what Stevie Nicks was always chasing after.
Fleetwood Mac may have given her the best outlet to create masterpieces, but listening back to their iconic tracks, it’s not like she was aching to be onstage next to Lindsey Buckingham for the rest of her life. She knew that she needed to work with other people, and by the time her solo career rolled around, she had found some of the best songwriters in the game throwing their hats into the ring to guest on her records.
While Bella Donna does feel like she is starting from zero all over again, it’s not like she didn’t have a bit of experience from those years stifled by ‘The Mac’. There was no way that she was going to fit every song that she wanted on an album like Tusk, but with the help of Jimmy Iovine, Don Henley, and Tom Petty, she set herself up to become one of the greatest female superstars that the world had ever seen.
But it’s not like she necessarily needed everyone around her to be an icon. Despite Iovine’s insistence that ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ be the first single off of her record, there’s a reason why ‘Edge of Seventeen’ has gone down in history as one of the biggest tunes she’s ever had. She truly felt like someone finally set free to do what she wanted, but if there was one role that she thrived in more than most, it was being a collaborator.
There are countless Fleetwood Mac songs written by Buckingham that wouldn’t have been half the tunes they were without Nicks in the mix, and that kind of spirit wasn’t about to stop once she started working on her own tunes. She could always thrive on having someone to bounce ideas off of, and while Dave Stewart has done a fine job in helping her make her late-career classics in the 2010s, Timespace did give everyone a bit of a change of pace.
Because as much as Nicks loved keeping up to date with the newer bands on the scene, the thought of her working with Bret Michaels did seem like a little bit of a stretch. Poison was far from the most respectable band to come out of Los Angeles at the time, but when Nicks saw the frontman begin working on tracks like ‘Love’s A Hard Game to Play’, she got to see the true artist underneath all those layers of makeup.
When talking about the track, Nicks knew Michaels was exactly what she was looking for, saying, “One of these men who has everything – beauty, sensitivity, warmth, and a love for life that I had not seen in a long time. I recorded his song, singing it for him to the best of my ability, hoping that the people would love the song as much as we loved doing it. A new friend, in this business, who asks for nothing but for me to be happy, is a very rare thing. I hope he will remain my friend for a long time.”
And while Michaels did still keep going down the glam-rock road with Poison, it’s not like there weren’t a few commonalities between their styles. After all, Fleetwood Mac had been known for their rootsy approach to rock and roll, and it’s not exactly an accident that Michaels would start transitioning from being one of the most glamorous rock stars on the scene to the cowboy-hat bandana-clad rock star in the 2000s.
Even if Nicks had more of a handle on her career at that point, it was probably for the best that she had that support system on a greatest hits record. Any new songs featured on a greatest hits album are always going to be a little bit risky, but if she had someone that openhearted working with her, she didn’t have a damn thing to worry about.
