The song Stevie Nicks waited three decades to record: “It saw the future”
Stevie Nicks is never one to rush through her creative process. Her songs are like her children in a lot of ways, and if she doesn’t feel comfortable letting them out into the world, she will keep refining them until she thinks it’s time to record them. Although she had the vision for what ‘Sorcerer’ was going to become all the way back in the 1970s, she didn’t feel comfortable wearing that musical costume until the next millennium.
Considering how she was being treated in Fleetwood Mac, though, Nicks could have pulled a George Harrison and put out a triple record on her debut, Bella Donna. She had all this untapped potential as a songwriter, and since Lindsey Buckingham took over the studio when recording their double record Tusk, only a handful of Nicks’ tunes ended up on the final project.
Once she had a better handle on what she wanted out of her solo career, ‘Sorcerer’ was the kind of track that felt tailor-made for her voice. The lyrics surrounding a woman asking a sorcerer to show her the mystical side of life may as well have been her origin story before she even started writing with Fleetwood Mac, but it had been sitting on ice until she decided to give it to Marilyn Martin for the soundtrack to the film Streets of Fire.
While Martin does a fine job on the track, something is definitely missing in her version. The execution is there, but when listening to her take a swing on some of Nicks’s vocal leaps, one can’t help but think she’s trying to do a half-hearted version of ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and not pulling it off that effectively.
A lot can change over time, though, and Nicks was a different person once she got started on Trouble in Shangrila. She had still made stunning music with Fleetwood Mac, but her struggle to come back after Street Angel was never going to be easy, and after working alongside Sheryl Crow, Nicks finally had the confidence to resurrect ‘Sorcerer’. If anything, it’s probably more autobiographical than even Nicks was aware of. After all, the tune had been written before she joined Fleetwood Mac and was performing with Buckingham as a duo, so lines about a sorcerer leading her to another place could very well be about her old flame.
But this wasn’t meant to be a nostalgia show. By taking on the tune later, Nicks thought that the piece guided the rest of her career, recalling in Gold Dust Woman, “I always think some of my songs are premonitions, and [‘Sorcerer’] is one of them. It saw the future. The lady from the mountains was the lady from San Francisco who moves to Los Angeles to follow her dream–which was to become a rock star–and a rock star she became.”
Considering that Nicks was about to reunite with her old bandmates for the massive album Say You Will, ‘Sorcerer’ was the first taste of what she had to offer. She hadn’t gone anywhere in that time, but now that artists like Crow were dominating the airwaves, Nicks figured that she would record ‘Sorcerer’ to remind everyone that one of the reigning queens of rock and roll could still make a classic tune when she wanted.
