The producer Stevie Nicks hated working with: “This is not my record”
Stevie Nicks has been used to the word ‘compromise’ from the very beginning of her career. She had already started out in Fleetwood Mac and had to split her songs between five band members, but it was as excruciating trying to cut down the number of songs that she could fit on any of their albums. The whole reason she made herself a solo star was to have more of a voice, but there were just as many issues with creative direction when Glyn Johns came in to work with her on Street Angel.
Then again, her 1990s output falls into a weird place in her career. The classic lineup of Fleetwood Mac had disintegrated years before, and it wasn’t clear that Nicks wanted to stick around much longer after the album Behind the Mask. At the same time, the afterglow of this project would be shortlived when the classic lineup reunited just a few years later for the album The Dance.
Still, this is an intriguing insight into Nicks’ head, letting her air out some of her personal problems as well as interesting covers like her take on Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’. Since she was rock royalty, Johns seemed like a perfect fit until he overstayed his welcome just a little bit.
As far as Nicks was concerned, Johns thought that it was his record first and that she was just the performer, saying, “I didn’t like it when he was there, and he knew it, and basically he told me to… like, in no uncertain English, very rough terms, to shut up and deal with it and this was the way it was going to be.”
Then again, having to deal with massive egos in the studio wasn’t anything new for Nicks. She had already come off of dealing with Lindsey Buckingham constantly, who instructed her on how her own songs were supposed to go while writing tracks like ‘Go Your Own Way’ about how much he couldn’t stand her during the making of Rumours.
Under those set of circumstances, there’s probably a damn good reason why Nicks didn’t want to put through the emotional rollercoaster again with Johns. While she soldiered on and completed the record with the help of E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan, there were just as many problems after the recording was finished.
For Nicks, the album is still far from perfect, saying, “This is not my record. So I went back in for about eight weeks, and I didn’t mess with the vocals, which I should have… I should have gone back in and really worked with the album, with the vocals. Because that’s something that [I thought], maybe you just need to let this go and go on.”
Even though the vocals do sound a bit different from Nicks’ traditional smokey voice, it’s far from a bad fit. Considering many of the songs on the record deal with the fractured relationships that have happened throughout her life, those imperfections just feel like an added bit of character rather than anything too blemished. Compared to the heights of Bella Donna or even The Other Side of the Mirror, this is the kind of album that Nicks probably wants to forget the most.
