The 1981 album Stevie Nicks wants to be remembered for: “All because of a tragic love affair”
Being alone is at the core of Stevie Nicks‘ music. She might be a rock legend who can set a stadium ablaze, but there is also an argument, as a viral skateboarding video ironically proved in 2020, that her songs sound even better when you’re alone.
In fact, even when she is playing the grandest arenas on offer, she has a rare ability to make the spotlight seem like a flickering candle and a room full of 50,000 people feel like a private serenade. She could make you feel lonely at your own birthday party, and somehow, through some curious quirk of music, that proves a deeply pleasurable experience.
As it happens, this is how her music is crafted. The first song she ever wrote, ‘I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad but not Blue’, was written by her alone in her barricaded bedroom, bemoaning the end of a relationship that “never happened”. The song became a way for her to pull a duvet over the world and escape into her own pillow-propped realm of fantasy.
That’s a pastiche that follows her best work around. She wrote ‘Landslide’ alone on the floor in Aspen, teary-eyed after saying goodbye to Lindsey Buckingham as he went off to tour as a hired hand. ‘Dreams’ was written alone in Sly Stone’s bedroom as she once again attempted to ease the ails of her heart by pouring them into a song.
So, perhaps it makes sense that the album she thinks defines her best is the one that came when she was finally alone in a musical sense. With Bella Donna, Nicks pulled the duvet over the increasingly testy exploits of Fleetwood Mac and gave her bedroom songs the chance to flourish in a more liberated capacity.
With the band, songwriting duties were split quite stringently, leaving her with around three tracks on each record. She even had to beg for ‘Dreams’ to be featured on Rumours, and ‘Silver Springs’ was unfairly given the B-side treatment. For someone who made sense of the world through music, that was beginning to feel quite restrictive.
Why did Stevie Nicks go solo for Bella Donna?
As Benmont Tench of The Heartbreakers explained, “She’s a creative perpetual-motion machine.” If that’s the case, then the engine of her solo debut was fueled by unfortunate tragedy. She had been touring in Australia when John Lennon was murdered, and she returned to find that her uncle was gravely ill. This shocking confrontation of mortality sent her almost immediately to the solace of her bedroom piano.
Speaking about her uncle Bill’s death, she reflected, “My cousin John Nicks and I were in the room when he died. There was just John and I there. That was part of the song when I went running down the hallways looking for somebody – I thought, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s his wife and the rest of the family?’ At that point, I went back to the piano and finished the song.”
She decided to finish a few songs that were lingering over from Fleetwood Mac albums, too. With that, Nicks decided to dwell in her own world for a little bit longer. However, there is a second, equally powerful aspect to her work. Solitude might be a prominent aspect of her work, but while she might write the song alone in the truest sense, she has never been shy of presenting them to a party.
In the past, that party had always been one hosted by others. Now, she decided that she would throw the ball herself, on her own terms, with her own guests.
Why is it Stevie Nicks’ most defining album?
“Bella Donna was a dream. I chose Lori Perry-Nicks and Sharon Celani as my army to go on that journey with me. I wanted us to sound like the girl version of Crosby, Stills and Nash. I did not want the record to sound anything like Fleetwood Mac,” she wrote of her debut solo album, “That would have defeated the dream”.
This was about honouring her own little escape, something that she had foreseen way back on her 16th birthday when her first heartbroken track rose from under the cover of her quilted fantasies.
The 1981 effort came six years after her first involvement with Fleetwood Mac. It might sound like a brief period, but the turmoil of that time gave her plenty to ruminate on. In a fitting fashion, Tench figured that the studio felt almost like a bedroom itself. ”The ambience of the studio was gorgeous,” the keyboardist said, ”aesthetically pleasing. Stevie brought the ambience, not necessarily in items from her house, but just the spirit. The same mood that was in her house made it to the vocal booth.”
In this homely space, she reflected on her life and the stories she had encountered, weaving experience and fantasy together. The title track was perhaps the most telling on this front. The record started with Nicks penning an ode to her boyfriend’s mother, who had seen her lover banished to imprisonment in France following his involvement in the Chilean military coup of 1973. The lovers never saw each other again in the interim years, and tugged at Nicks’ creative strings.
She vowed that this track would be expanded into an album and that the project would be a bold, poetic statement of womanly defiance. “I never doubted for a moment that this song would be the title of the record and that it would change my life in so many ways – on so many levels,” she said. “It was ours – it defined how I would feel about love forever. It broke my heart and gave me the strength to fight for it – It was a fine line to walk between love and hate and passion – and the girls and I loved it. We never looked back.”
This became the decree of the album as she hunkered down with Jimmy Iovine and her friends for months on end in a studio that felt like a home. She might have still been battling addiction and the froes of Fleetwood’s tumult, but when she stepped into the Pacific Palisades studio, shunning them was never an issue. The gilded tracks became her sole passion.
“I could not have been more proud of those songs – or the three months it took me, the girls – and Jimmy Iovine to craft it,” she remarked. But that pinnacle of that pride came in the aftermath of its reception. “And then – as all never-ending dreams always do – it opened the doors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, took my hand, and invited me in for my own work – for the women of the world.” She concluded that the record is the work she is “most proud of.”
It liberated not only Nicks as a solo artist, changing the dynamic of Fleetwood Mac in the process, as up until that point, even Tench had seen her as just a pawn in the band, but it gave females, in general, a firmer footing in classic rock. As she proudly extols, “All because of a tragic love affair that caused an important and relevant song – to be turned into a story that the world seemed to love – Bella Donna.”
Now, over four decades on, that tale still seems vitally important, not least because of the great stride forward it made for women in music, something that Nicks has always put at the forefront of her ambition. But beyond that, it captures Nicks at her most naked. And she shoulders that vulnerability with captivating strength.
As she put it herself, “Your graciousness is what carries you. It isn’t how old you are, how beautiful you are, or how short your skirt is. What it is, is what comes out of your heart. If you are gracious, you have won the game.” Bella Donna is Nicks wrestling a defiant win from the jaws of defeat with the last kick of the game.
