The song Stevie Nicks wrote for The Eagles’ Joe Walsh: “He is my soul”
Stevie Nicks is far more than an accumulation of the relationships she had, that should be made clear form the very start. Despite being one of the rock stars who has endured a catalogue of hardships and lived a life in and out of the tabloids, to reduce her contribution to the music world to just tracks about men is to miss the point of her creation entirely.
The singer is a double Rock and Roll Hall of Famer for a reason, and, pure and simple, that reason is unbridled talent. Whether it is her commanding stage presence, crystalline vocal or powerful songwriting, skill and craft are what made Nicks an icon. With her status confirmed, the songwriter made the smart move to not just write about wild themes or strange occurrences, but reflect her own life, and especially the love and lust that filled it with pain and joy.
It means, across the years, Nicks penned songs about her love interest with Rupert Hine, Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham and more. While all of those men may have had an influence on Stevie Nicks’ life, they are, in fact, only the most famous faces of the bunch. Nicks’ real love, the one many call her “great, great love”, was Joe Walsh of Eagles. During one of their drives through the Rocky Mountains, Walsh opened up to Nicks about the loss of his young daughter, who had sadly died in a car accident a decade earlier.
Walsh showed Nicks a drinking fountain that he had installed in tribute to his daughter with a plaque that reads “For All Those Who Aren’t Big Enough to Get a Drink.” It rocked Nicks emotionally and convinced her to begin writing this delicate and touching piano ballad. It’s some of the songwriter’s most vulnerable work. Nicks knocked most of the song off in five minutes; such was the intense feeling, and she accurately denotes such vivid emotions within the song. While it was written for Walsh, its sentiment is universal as Nicks sings: “If not me/ Then do it for the world”.
Stevie Nicks explained the story in her liner notes, “I guess in a very few rare cases, some people find someone that they fall in love with the very first time they see them… from across the room, from a million miles away. Some people call it love at first sight, and of course, I never believed in that until that night I walked into a party after a gig at the hotel, and from across the room, without my glasses, I saw this man and I walked straight to him. He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them. I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again… he is my soul.”
Love, at first sight, is a distant concept for most people, but there was another draw for Nicks: “He seemed to be in a lot of pain, though hid it well. But finally, a few days later, (we were in Denver), he rented a jeep and drove me up into the snow-covered hills of Colorado… for about two hours. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but he did tell me a story of a little daughter that he had lost. To Joe, she was much more than a child. She was three and a half, and she could relate to him.”
She continued, “I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she EVER complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.”
“As we drove up to this beautiful park, (it was snowing a little bit), he came around to open my door and help me down, and when I looked up, I saw the park… his baby’s park, and I burst into tears saying, ‘You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn’t you?'” She continues her story, “I was right, under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink.”
She concluded, “So he wrote a song for her, and I wrote a song for him… ‘This is your song, ‘ I said to the people, but it was Joe’s song.” This isn’t the first time she’s said something like this about a song, either, often speaking of songs as belonging to others after drawing inspiration.
Stevie Nicks is someone who can find inspiration in a variety of places, and this is yet another example of that pattern. If you want to hear the song Stevie Nicks wrote about Joe Walsh, you can find it down below.
