‘Street Angel’: The album that made Stevie Nicks “stop writing” songs
Artists like Stevie Nicks never feel the need to stop writing music.
The whole point of being an artist is to keep innovating, and even if a record isn’t due out, the best musicians are the ones that have songs poured out of them without having to think too hard about it. The muse can be a beautiful thing in many respects, but the most disconcerting feeling is when you go down to that musical well and come up with nothing.
But Nicks was always used to writing in an unconventional way whenever she made her tunes. She was far from a virtuoso on any instrument, but when she had the germ of an idea, songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Rhiannon’ were clear examples of her playing to her strengths. She didn’t need to have the most complex arrangement around her all the time, because usually her voice could do most of that work for her half the time.
And while her hot streak had been building throughout Fleetwood Mac, going solo was inevitable. There was no reason to sit there and wait around for the rest of the band to pick out the tracks they liked, and whenever she came out with her solo records, fans could tell that this wasn’t her attempt to make hits. These were songs that came from her soul, and whether it was joyful, ugly, or somewhere in between, you could always hear Nicks’s personality in every single track.
Once trouble started brewing in Fleetwood Mac, though, Behind the Mask was the first time Nicks’s songs seemed to be lacking. Lindsey Buckingham’s decision to leave the group was already going to weigh heavy on everyone, but even when left to her own devices on Street Angel, she realised that she had kicked her cocaine habit and developed an entirely new one when new drugs took hold of her.
While far from a bad record, Street Angel is the first time where it felt like we were listening to Nicks at a distance. She was already in her own world after being put on drugs like Klonopin, and after she came out of that haze, she was mature enough to see that a lot of her medication was taking the joy out of doing what she loved.
She knew she could write songs, but she no longer had the will to do it anymore, saying, “I was taking a thing called Klonopin-like a Valium thing. This was prescribed for me by a serious doctor. I started taking it in 1986. By 1989, it wasn’t that I didn’t write well, I just stopped writing. Just too blasé to care.” And when listening to the record, it really starts to show that her heart wasn’t in it like it used to be.
Every tune still had that signature vocal of hers sprinkled across every single line, but even when making her own version of ‘Just Like A Woman’, there are moments where she can feel like she’s going through the motions. She needed to pull herself out of the spiral, and when she finally re-emerged both with Fleetwood Mac and her solo career in the 2000s, she felt like a new artist altogether.
Anyone in her shoes could have easily relied on her friends like Waddy Watchel and Tom Petty to help fix up her songs now and again, but she was always bigger than that. She had beaten the second nastiest drug she ever had to deal with, and while she was out of practice as a songwriter for a while, everything from Trouble in Shangri-La to In Your Dreams reminded everyone why the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ should be so revered.
