Stevie Nicks – ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’
By 1989, Stevie Nicks had become the most popular woman in rock music. With her signature blend of witchy themes, pop melodies, and intensely personal lyrics, Nicks had fully emancipated herself from her role as one of three singers in Fleetwood Mac. In fact, of all the members of the band, she was inarguably the most popular, having scored two top-five albums and four top-ten singles by the end of the 1980s. It was a feat that none of her bandmates were able to match, but all good things had to come to an end.
1989’s The Other Side of the Mirror isn’t really all that different from any of Nicks’ other studio albums from that decade. It has the kind of bombastic production style that was still en vogue at the time, it features a notable duet, and it has its fair share of insights into her personal life. But The Other Side of the Mirror would end up becoming the end of Nicks’ reign as a massively successful contemporary solo artist. It was her last top ten album in over a decade, containing the final top 20 hit of her career, after which she would experience a major upheaval in her professional standing.
The Other Side of the Mirror doesn’t beat around the bush – it kicks off with ‘Rooms on Fire’, the album’s first and most fondly remembered single. If nothing else, ‘Rooms on Fire’ proved that Nicks still had the hooks and powerful lyrics that could reel audiences in. Still, the sense of staleness and repetitiveness is hard to ignore with chorus lines like “Well maybe I’m just thinking that the rooms are all on fire / Every time that you walk in the room”. It’s an appropriate overture for the album as a whole – more of the same, for better or worse.
Most of the time, it’s either for the better or relatively inoffensive. Tracks like ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Cry Wolf’ work best because they tap into Nicks’ signature mystique. There’s something ethereal and almost supernatural about her style – it’s human love and emotions filtered through lace curtains, smoke machines, and seances. When Nicks is on point, she can conjure mystery and interest effortlessly.
The problem is that The Other Side of the Mirror tried too hard. Sometimes the album is dedicated to its Lewis Carroll-inspired themes (most notably on ‘Alice’), but elsewhere it seems that Nicks is throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. The album’s big duet is with Bruce Hornsby on ‘Two Kings of Love’, a limp ’80s ballad that falls flat. Nicks also tries her hand at Byrds-like folk rock on ‘Fire Burning’, which unsurprisingly comes from Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.
The real enemy of The Other Side of the Mirror is producer Rupert Hine. Hine’s area of expertise was taking rock artists and bringing them into more contemporary pop settings. The issue is that Hine was working at a time when the standard sounds of pop were gaudy synthesisers and hilariously offputting live instrumentation. Tracks like ‘Ooh My Love’ and ‘Whole Lotta Trouble’ are completely ruined by their incredibly dated production, even as Nicks tries her best to rise above the Seinfeld basslines and Casio keyboard tones.
It’s on the album’s final three tracks where Nicks seems the most lost. Nicks herself is solely responsible for writing the songs ‘Juliet’ and ‘Doing the Best I Can (Escape from Berlin)’. The former is a rehash of her standard lovelorn style (familiar objects mentioned include ribbons, bows, wind, a blue crystal mirror, and a book of miracles), while the latter makes a bizarre connection to then-Soviet-occupied Berlin in its title. None of the song’s lyrics have anything to do with the city, and once the Berlin Wall came down six months later, it illustrated how strangely out of step Nicks was getting.
The final track on the album is a strange take on Johnny Cash’s ‘I Still Miss Someone’. While Nicks should get kudos for attempting to revamp and rearrange the classic country tune, Hine is once again to blame for programming keyboards that sound like you’ve been put on hold at a dentist’s office. She was still up for taking risks – probably for the last time – but most of those risks don’t pay off in any meaningful way.
In the UK and much of Europe, The Other Side of the Mirror was her biggest solo success. But in America, audiences were beginning to tire of Nicks as a mainstream force. As music tastes began to turn away from the pop rock of the 1980s, Nicks was left in a sort of no man’s land. After a dispute with Mick Fleetwood over the use of her song ‘Silver Springs’, Nicks left Fleetwood Mac without any specific focus on her solo career. Instead, Nicks slid into a multi-year stretch of drug dependency that lasted until the mid-1990s.
While it may not be the most beloved or accomplished album in her solo discography, The Other Side of the Mirror still has that unassailable magic that Nicks can conjure up seemingly at will. The material might not be as strong, and the production might be harder to ignore, but this is still unmistakably a Stevie Nicks. The Other Side of the Mirror would be the final chapter in her career as a contemporary hitmaker, and while it has its embarrassing moments, Nicks still comes out the other side relatively unscathed. If only the same could be said for the next half-decade of her life.
