“So ill”: the Klonopin-fuelled tragedy behind the Stevie Nicks album ‘Street Angel’
With eight solo albums and seven with Fleetwood Mac, it’s expected that Stevie Nicks‘ discography might have some dips or dull moments. Given the external challenges she has faced, such as imposter syndrome and addiction, it’s also understandable that some of her songs and albums don’t fully reflect her true potential as one of the greatest rock musicians in history. After all, even she once referred to some of her more detached moments as her “down and out” years.
In many ways, these challenges have been there from the very beginning. However, sat at home with Lindsey Buckingham away at work to try to earn a living, it’s unlikely—and impossible— that Nicks would know her impending stardom would welcome new anxieties beyond whether she would make it in the music industry as a successful and credible artist. However, when the stars finally aligned, understanding that the persistent high would be inevitably followed by deflation was a difficult reality to reckon with.
For many years, it seemed Fleetwood Mac would never be on top. Nicks rode a rush so explosive it felt gifted to her by the stars, flustered in all its beautiful rose-tinted glory at the hands of hit after hit, a high swiftly transitioning from charting position to one with a more powdery makeup. But this was no bother—at least not in the band’s minds—especially when it became more of an engrained ritual in the studio and before live shows.
Continuing into her solo career like a growing dark shadow, Nicks already knew the risks and dangers of keeping it up, newly perturbed by a reliance on Klonopin that made her worse off than anything cocaine ever did. The problem this time was that it also removed her writing ability, making the music she put out feel like a distant echo of the magic she had made previously. “Klonopin was worse than the cocaine,” she later said, adding, “I lost those 8 years of my life. I didn’t write, and I had gained so much weight.”
When she stopped taking Klonopin, Nicks started working on her fifth album, Street Angel. This would be Nicks’ least successful and lowest-charting album of her career, coming at a significant juncture marked by immense unhappiness and an overpowering lack of direction. At the same time, Nicks began to notice that the back-and-forth with trying to make the album great was making it worse, not to mention wasting a lot of time when she could put it out there and move on, facing the downfall head-on.
With Nicks, however, taking setbacks in her stride is never easy, especially after facing such a skyrocket of success earlier on in her career and not knowing how to handle dips in success when they inevitably come around. “[The record] may be new for everybody else,” she said, “but it’s really old for me,” reflecting on the three-year period it took from her life, figuratively and creatively. She also bluntly described it as a “disaster” during an interview with Sheryl Crow in 2001, showing that she knew it wouldn’t land but that she had to move on anyway.
“I had been so ill on Klonopin for that eight years that that record was just a disaster,” she said, claiming it wasn’t “clear” and didn’t sound like her music as a result. Thankfully, the music she worked on afterwards naturally reflected what she wanted to say, as she now knew what it meant and felt like to create something that felt so inherently wrong. Still, Nicks knows the highs and lows of the music world better than anybody, and it’s unlikely that a failed album would have stopped her from continuing to live her dream.
