The song Stevie Nicks thought never got heard: “Might as well dump them out the window”
There’s always a tinge of regret that comes with putting out songs. As much as you might want to fix them until they are absolutely perfect, there’s a good chance that not every one of your masterpieces is going to get the same amount of attention that you’d like them to, while something that took no time at all skyrockets up the charts. It’s the nature of the beast in rock and roll, but Stevie Nicks admitted that the song ‘Twisted’ was cast out to die when it was released on the Twister soundtrack.
At the same time, Nicks’ approach to songs was never about writing to order. There were tunes that sometimes worked better if sung by someone else, but outside of writing ‘Leather and Lace’ for country legend Merle Haggard, some of Nicks’ best moments came when she was writing her innermost thoughts and praying that her audience connected with them.
But by the late 1990s, she had started to hit a major stumbling block. Her time in Fleetwood Mac was coming to a dark end, and while the original lineup would return for the iconic live set The Dance, Nicks was committed to making her next solo record Street Angel, complete with a massive addiction to pills.
Despite still having an innate knack for melody, Nicks had collapsed creatively, saying that she did not get along with the producer of the record and admitting that it contained some of her personal least favourite tracks she had ever worked on. So, naturally, that’s not the best headspace for someone to be in when making a soundtrack song for a Hollywood blockbuster.
Hell, that wouldn’t even be the only bit of musical drama to come from Twister. Along with featuring Nicks at one of the lowest ebbs of her career, it also featured the Van Halen song ‘Humans Being’, which might hold the distinction as the one track that single-handedly ended the Van Hagar years.
Still, it didn’t matter much to Nicks, thinking that ‘Twisted’ was bound to never get any attention, saying, “When songs go into movies, you might as well dump them out of the window as you’re driving by because they never get heard.” But outside of being a throwaway tune on a soundtrack, there’s still some captivating imagery here.
After all, she made some of the most striking images of her career about the changing of the weather on ‘Dreams’, and equating that to a relationship falling apart here is absolutely enchanting. There doesn’t seem to be as many overt references to the storyline, but a line about living for the danger and following whatever whirlwind comes your way is the kind of universal language that touches anyone going through times of trouble.
Maybe ‘Twisted’ deserves a better fate than it ultimately got, but it is far from a dud in Nicks’ solo catalogue. Because when paired next to her celebrated material, the fact that she can make something this powerful coming off of one of the darkest chapters of her life may be proof that she is indeed a musical witch.
