The 1981 song that made Stevie Nicks leave Fleetwood Mac: “I knew I had the basis”
It was bound to be difficult for anyone to try to leave Fleetwood Mac the same way that Stevie Nicks did.
Sure, the band could be hell to work with every single time they started aiming songs at each other, but even if they could grin and bear it for the better part of an album, the idea of Nicks going solo felt like she was going to leave the entire band behind to a certain degree. But she made a pact to be a member of the band for as long as possible, and she wouldn’t have chosen to leave if it wasn’t for a really good reason.
And when listening to a lot of the tunes that turned up in her solo career, there are many tracks that couldn’t have been made with ‘The Mac’. ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ seemed tailor-made for Nicks’s voice, even when Tom Petty was demoing the tune, and ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ had that kind of rolling rhythm that didn’t slide off the fingers in the same way that Lindsey Buckingham plucked his way through every single song. But a lot of the ideas that turned up on her solo projects were about being practical.
She wasn’t getting the same kind of attention for her songs as she wanted, and even if she was willing to work on a few of her bandmates’ tunes and cut down some of her own contributions, there was always friction during the making of Tusk, where she felt like she needed to get a lot more of her ideas out. But she had to be asking herself which songs would have fit better outside of the Fleetwood Mac mould.
Her entire life as a songwriter was about writing with people like Buckingham, and if he wasn’t going to take part in her solo record, she needed to find songs that could stand on their own. There were already a handful of leftovers from the Rumours sessions, like ‘Think About It’, but it wasn’t until she hit on the title track to Bella Donna that she felt like she had something greater than what she had been doing in her old band.
Based on a story that she heard about her boyfriend’s mother, who had an affair with a man in Chile, Nicks felt like the title track was the first time she felt comfortable working without her bandmates, saying, “[It was] about my boyfriend’s mother who was involved with a man in Chile during the coup that happened there in 1973. The love story never really ended – but she never saw him again. I was so touched by this story of lost love that I wrote ‘Bella Donna’.”
“The moment the poem and then the song was finished, I knew I had the basis for my first solo record.”
Granted, that kind of love story was so detailed that Nicks could have written it in her sleep if she wanted to. The entire concept of the spiritual side of love was always there in her music, and if she was talking about people who were in love but could never see each other again, she was going to bring the same kind of delivery that made every single line feel like an emotional wrecking ball every time she sang.
And while Fleetwood Mac would always be a looming shadow over her throughout her solo career, nothing about ‘Bella Donna’ really sounds like her old band. There are certain echoes of tunes like ‘Rhiannon’ in some spots, but the best part of the song is feeling that lonely spirit in the rest of the band, almost like you can feel the heartache every single time those guitar bends come in on the chorus.
Nicks had finally turned herself into her own artist, and while that may have caused more than a little bit of friction with the rest of her band, she wasn’t about to apologise. She wasn’t about to spend the next decade of her life slowly getting her songs out, and with one song, she managed to deliver her sonic mission statement.
