Stevie Nicks on the most she ever committed to a song: “Nothing ever seems as dark anymore”
Every artist approaches their craft a little bit differently. There are no rules in pop music, and chances are that the one thing holding an artist back tends to be the greatest strength of someone else half a world away. While Stevie Nicks was always going to come through with thoughtful lyrics on any song she wrote, she felt that ‘Have Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’ was one of the most she ever attached herself to one of her melodies.
Because for someone like Nicks, the song is where you get to let out all of your emotion onto the page. Whether it’s feeling depressed, lonely, in love, or just thankful for the world you live in, there’s always a little piece of someone’s soul that gets left in the final mix when everything’s over.
And it’s not like Nicks didn’t have her fair share of soul-lashing, either. Rumours could have been a glorified soap opera even without any of the tunes, but listening back to ‘Dreams’, it’s easy to hear Nicks trying as hard as she can to hold everything together, whether that’s about laying into Lindsey Buckingham for their relationship or patiently waiting for those storm clouds to pass away.
Once Nicks flew outside of Fleetwood Mac, though, she knew that she had found another love of her life in Joe Walsh. Despite being the resident wild man behind the Eagles, Walsh found a confidante in Nicks, whom he would start a romance with throughout the 1980s that eventually would fall through the cracks.
Even though it wasn’t going to work out, ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’ was one parting gift that Nicks left for him. While she had written tribute tracks before, this was to give Walsh some sense of closure after dealing with the fallout of the death of his daughter, Emma. Rather than try to ease the pain, Nicks sounds like she’s trying to offer a helping hand to Walsh through his emotional strife, even though she probably knows that moving on from something so tragic would be near-impossible.
While Nicks is happy to share her experiences with every audience, she admitted that this song was aimed squarely at the guitarist, saying, “I wrote a song for him… ‘This is your song, ‘ I said to the people, but it was Joe’s song. Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so many ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive.”
Regardless of the amount of pain in her voice, this is one of the best optimistic songs that Nicks ever penned. She knows that the storm clouds have been following Walsh around for years, but she’s here to remind him that it sometimes takes a strong amount of hurt for someone to appreciate what they still have here on Earth as well.
In fact, this is the unintended sequel to ‘Dreams’ in a lot of ways. Whereas the first song was Nicks trying to console herself in her time of trouble, she had developed into someone strong enough to be able to help one of her friends in even more dire circumstances.
