“I couldn’t do it”: Stevie Nicks laments the album she hated making “more than life”
Not every album has to be a walk in the park for everyone involved. The idea of compromising your vision to fit within a band mindset is always a tough sell, and even when everyone has an equal say, there’s still going to be stuff left on the cutting room floor that stirs up bad blood. While Stevie Nicks knew the best way to keep Fleetwood Mac going was to step out of the picture for a while, that didn’t necessarily make things easier for her bandmates either.
Looking through all of their classic albums, though, Nicks often had to take a back seat to Lindsey Buckingham. He was the one trying to turn her sketches into songs half the time, but when she started making tunes of her own and was able to form the basis of a track right off the bat, it was like she had grown up exponentially within the span of a few months.
Although Rumours was the moment everyone was forced to grin and bear it through some tunes, Tusk was when Nicks had had enough. It was clear that Buckingham was taking over the studio half the time, and while that did lead to some interesting moments, it often made the record feel like it wanted to be five different albums at the exact same time, whether that was Nicks wanting to make her own music or Buckingham trying his hand at old-school rock and roll, new wave, or power-pop.
While Bella Donna gave Nicks an incubator for her songs half the time, it was going to be tough trying to get back into the band. After all, she had one of the most profitable solo careers of any woman in the industry, and having to deal with Buckingham dictating things all over again during the sessions for Mirage did her absolutely no favours.
Everyone was able to make it through the sessions bravely enough, everyone needed to do a little more than record the songs. That meant going on the promotional trail for the record, and by the time Nicks had to pose for the album cover, she was practically seething with anger at the idea of dancing alongside Buckingham.
She might be shown with her head tilted to the side, but that may have been intentional in some respects, with Nicks recalling, “I hated posing for that more than life. And then, when I shot the video for ‘If Anyone Falls’, the director wanted me to dance with this guy and throw my head back, and I couldn’t do it. We had to call in a backup singer to do it.”
While it’s probably easier for her to do that with an actor, Nicks never saw herself as a thespian and a musician. She was willing to commit to her music, but her theatricality was always about having control, and having her have her head thrown back may as well have been torture on the cover, since everyone knew of the turbulent relationship that she had with Buckingham at the best of times.
In fact, it’s easy to look at Mirage as almost the inverse cover of Rumours for Nicks. The former had shown her out in full force in her ‘Gold Dust Woman’ persona, but the reserved woman who refused to even show her face on the band’s 1980s album may as well have been a walking ghost as far as Nicks was concerned.
