The 1981 song Stevie Nicks crowned as her favourite: “My sexiest song”
Some songs become so embedded in popular culture that they stop feeling like they belong to the artist who wrote them. Stevie Nicks has plenty of those, both from her time with Fleetwood Mac and across her solo career.
With Rumours in particular, those songs carry so much emotional baggage because of what it took to write them that it’s easy to understand why her personal favourite is something more cheeky and frivolous, while also being great fun to perform live.
As much as singing ‘Go Your Own Way’ might be the highlight of the audience’s night, it’s different when it’s your life that the song’s about, and you’re exchanging vocal duties with a former flame.
After a rollercoaster of a few years with Fleetwood Mac, full of professional highs and personal lows, Nicks’ debut solo album in 1981 was necessary for her to break free and record Bella Donna for the sake of her own sanity.
When she took flight in her solo career, Nicks was free to make unrestricted art without pleasing her bandmates, which she found liberating. Admittedly, there is more pressure as a solo artist, and no room to hide if the venture fails, but creatively, it gave Nicks the platform to explore a different side of herself.
As much as there was a weight of expectations on Bella Donna, it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. There was always the fallback option for Fleetwood Mac; therefore, fulfilling her artistic desires mattered much more than chasing a hit record.
With Bella Donna, Nicks proved she could more than stand on her own two feet artistically and could go about her business in a way that was off-limits with Fleetwood Mac. ‘How Still My Love (In The Still of The Night)’, the song she once crowned as her personal favourite for the entirety of her career, was the perfect example of the ethos that fuelled the record.
“This is my favourite song; it’s called ‘In The Still Of The Night’,” Nicks once said of the track during a live performance. While the song isn’t as widely cherished as hits such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, it’s Nicks in her purest form and captures her unashamedly at peak confidence.
When Bella Donna was released, Nicks highlighted it as a personal favourite, noting: “‘Still of the Night’ was really probably one of my most romantic songs, I really wrote that about…I was feeling really romantic at the time. It’s my sexiest song. I love to sit and play it. It’s the vibe-iest song.”
Further illustrating her love for the track, Nicks explained that it was the only non-negotiable song on Bella Donna that she wasn’t prepared to remove from the album, adding, “It’s the one song I said had to be on the album, and it was the one that went in and out and in and out and off and on and off and on the album in the last four months, incredibly, until finally I knew that it would come around to people realising it’s really such a neat song even if it’s for yourself to enjoy it.”
Several decades later, Nicks reaffirmed her love for the song, explaining to EW why it is such an anomaly in her discography, “I really don’t write extremely sexual songs, never have.”
Nicks proudly elaborated, “But ‘How Still My Love’ really is a sexy song, and being that it’s one of my few sexy songs, when we do it onstage, it’s fun. It’s kind of woozy and it’s slow, but it’s got a really great beat—kind of a strip-tease, a little burlesque, a little Dita Von Teese-y.”
When she sings ‘How Still My Love’ live, Nicks allows herself to have unadulterated pleasure and express a different side of herself than she ordinarily shows. More importantly, on the song, she’s taking ownership of her sexuality and not allowing anybody else to define it on her behalf.
It doesn’t matter that ‘How Still My Love’ was never elected to be released as a single; it was a song that Nicks made for herself, not for the world.
