The Stevie Nicks song inspired by a fiery connection
Stevie Nicks has always written boldly and brazenly about her real-life relationships within her music. She channelled her turbulent relationship with Lindsey Buckingham into some of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits, penned sonic digs at Mick Fleetwood, and poured her love for Eagles’ Joe Walsh into her solo songwriting. But there was one short-lived relationship that would inspire a particularly fiery track from Nicks.
In 1989, Nicks unveiled her fourth studio record, The Other Side of the Mirror. The lead single for the release came in the form of the formidable ‘Rooms On Fire’, a sparkling track with instrumentation just as magical as its lyricism. “Well, maybe I’m just thinking that the rooms are all on fire every time that you walk in the room,” Nicks declares in the chorus, “Well, there is magic all around you.”
The magical, fiery object of Nicks’ lyrical affections was based on the track’s producer, Rupert Hine, who produced The Other Side of the Mirror. According to the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman, the day she met Hine was a “dangerous one”.
“He was different from anyone else I had ever known,” she recalled in the liner notes for her follow-up compilation album, Timespace, “He was older, and he was smarter, and we both knew it.” The pair hadn’t even spoken about music before Nicks asked him to do the album, calling it a “spiritual agreement”.
Together, they created the record in surroundings just as spiritual as their connection, collaborating in a “fabulous Dutch castle, at the top of the mountain” before moving to a studio that Nicks compared to a “cottage in Wales, it was a little spooky”. Somewhere in between the castle walls and studio sessions, Nicks found Hine to have a magnetic presence.
“It always seemed to me that whenever Rupert walked into one of these old, dark castle rooms, that the rooms were on fire,” she recalled, explaining the title and premise of the song. Despite their instant spiritual connection, the relationship between the two was not to be. “The rooms were still burning, but the fire had been stolen from us,” Nicks lamented.
Though the fire between the two may have fizzled out, it continued to burn within Nicks and her songwriting. “I came back to Los Angeles, a very changed woman,” she concluded, “And now, long nets of white cloud my memory. Now I remember the rooms, the music, and how truly magic the whole thing was.” ‘Rooms On Fire’ still contains the fire of those rooms and of their romance.
The song remains one of Nicks’ most enduring hits, with a magical quality of its own. Revisit ‘Rooms on Fire’ below.
