The 1970s band Stevie Nicks was in complete awe of: “These incredibly famous people”
Stevie Nicks never took a second of working with her backing band for granted.
Fleetwood Mac was a united front whenever they performed, and even when she decided to make a go of it in her solo career, there were a lot more people involved with making her albums sound immaculate every single time she sang. She wanted the chance to wow people every single time she sang, but there were more than a few times when she had to shake her head in amazement when the right person walked into the room.
Any other person trying to make a solo record after being in a band like ‘The Mac’ was already making a big jump, but Nicks’s idea to work with Jimmy Iovine was a match made in heaven to a certain degree. Iovine was known for working with the songs above everything else, and even though Nicks had more than her fair share of material left over from some Fleetwood Mac sessions, it was all about finding the right people to sing on them.
Tom Petty was already a done deal since Nicks had fallen in love with his music, but aside from ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, half of the record feels like a who’s who of talent from the rootsy rock scene. Lindsey Buckingham may have had a token appearance here and there, but if Nicks could find herself fitting in with the rest of the Heartbreakers, Eagles felt like they were on a completely different musical plane when she first started singing with Don Henley on ‘Leather and Lace’.
She and Henley already had an on-again-off-again relationship for a while, but after their duet was finished, getting ‘The Highwayman’ down was another matter entirely. Henley had already begun working his magic, but even after having Buckingham’s fingerstyle guitar on many of the tracks, having Don Felder walk into the room and make the closing track shimmer was the first time that she realised what she had on her hands.
These were legends at work, and there were moments where even Nicks needed to take it all in when she heard everything come together, saying, “It was like staring out and looking at the Eagles standing in front of me ’cause if you see Don Henley and Don Felder, that’s enough of the Eagles to look like the Eagles. A lot of these recording sessions were very romantic because I would just be standing there in the middle of this room, singing and looking at these incredibly famous people. So to be sharing my first album with them was like I can’t even tell you.”
But that kind of humility does a real disservice to what Nicks could do naturally every single time she sang. No one could manage to turn a song inside out like she could, and even if the basis of a song like ‘After the Glitter Fades’, no one could bring the same kind of authority to the tune that she could whenever she sang it.
That model may have worked for one record, but the rest of her career revolved around getting the right people to work with her on her tunes. She was more than capable of turning a song into gold herself, but if you had the opportunity to work with everyone from Prince to Sheryl Crow to Don Henley, you would probably be a fool if you said that you could do the whole thing on your own.
The point was to make the best record that Nicks ever could whenever she worked on her solo albums, and even if she had a security blanket in Fleetwood Mac, it was a lot more of an adventure figuring out what every song was supposed to be on something like Bella Donna. She was the one having the final say, and since the rest of the band weren’t looking over her shoulder, why not get some of the best artists of all time next to her?
