Stevie Nicks on her favourite album she made: “It was a really intense record”
There’s usually a particular circumstance for artists to make the best records of their career. No one goes into the studio thinking they will walk out with a classic because even if they have an agenda, something else behind the scenes can turn an album from simply good to a watermark for rock history. Stevie Nicks already made that difficult record when going through Rumours with Fleetwood Mac, but she felt she made one of the greatest albums she could possibly deliver on The Other Side of the Mirror.
It gets a bit challenging when going through all of Nicks’ classic material. While she did have a hand in bringing iconic songs to her main outfit like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’, those successes are shared with her bandmates like Lindsey Buckingham or Christine McVie albums. Once she struck out on her own, though, her material got a lot more introspective.
The rock and roll heart was still intact, to be sure, but there was also a restless spirit that seemed to be trapped inside her half the time. The real ‘Gold Dust Woman’ needed to come out on Bella Donna, but once she got her bearings, the rest of her recorded output became more like a musical confessional.
While Rock A Little marked a massive low for her in terms of substance abuse, hearing The Other Side of the Mirror feels like she had been reborn. For all of the headaches that had gone into Mirage and what was sure to come on later Fleetwood Mac projects, Nicks seemed to find her groove once again on tracks like ‘Room on Fire’ and ‘Whole Lotta Trouble’.
Even looking back on her career in the book Gold Dust Woman, Nicks confessed that her third outing might be up there with the most celebrated Fleetwood Mac projects, saying, “The Other Side of the Mirror is probably my favourite album. It was a really intense record. I had gotten away from the cocaine. I spent a year writing those songs, and I was so happy.”
That happiness is also contagious as soon as the first notes start. It may have been a shame that the Buckingham version of Fleetwood Mac wasn’t going to go the distance, but Nicks seemed more at peace in her solo career, as if she had taken all that heartache from the past few years and used it to work on herself.
Just because she made an excellent record didn’t mean she was completely out of the woods, though. By the time she got to making her next album, Street Angel, the pendulum had swung back the other way, with Nicks being strung out on pills before eventually beating her addiction and reuniting with Fleetwood Mac for the massive comeback project Say You Will.
Every one of Nicks’s solo records is informed by how she’s feeling in the moment, and by The Other Side of the Mirror, it wasn’t about the internal soap opera she had to deal with in her old outfit. This was just a chance to make a classic record, and given her reputation, she may have actually had some magic sprinkled onto the mastertape.
