Stevie Nicks on the song she called her “sexiest”
The idea of love and romance is all around the music that Stevie Nicks has made. From her time in Fleetwood Mac to her prominent solo career, Nicks’ main focus is love gained and love lost. Whether she’s taking her relationships with Lindsey Buckingham into account on songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ or translating the brutal loss that Joe Walsh experienced for the song ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’, Nicks lets the emotions flow freely in her work.
But when it comes to pure lust, Nicks isn’t really all that interested. She’s far too wrapped up in the ideals of true infatuation to stoop down to horniness… or so it seems. One major exception comes from ‘How Still My Love’, the album cut from her 1981 debut LP Bella Donna. Although she still finds time to reference the price of glory and calls out to the sea, the lyrics to ‘How Still My Love’ clearly outline a sensual night of discovery.
“‘How Still My Love’ 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,” Nicks explained in 1981. “I love to sit and play it. It’s the vibe-iest song. 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 realizing it’s really such a neat song even if it’s for yourself to enjoy it.”
With a slinky groove and some gentle soft-rock come-ons, ‘How Still My Love’ isn’t exactly a raucous call to go to bed. Still, Nicks sensual delivery is unmistakable and, according to the singer herself, completely purposeful.
“I really don’t write extremely sexual songs, never have. I’m always going to write about the bouquets and the flowers [laughs]. 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,” Nicks told Leah Greenblatt in 2009. “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.”
“The title actually came from two different books I saw in some hotel, one was called How Still My Love and one was called In the Still of the Night, and I used both, but I never even opened up the books [laughs], so I have no idea what they were about,” she added. “Whenever I come into a room with a library, in a hotel or whatever, I pull them all down and just sit — I get a lot of ideas that way.”
Check out ‘How Still My Love’ down below.
