The 1985 lyrics Stevie Nicks couldn’t read without crying: “We all choked up”
Perspective is one of the most interesting things in music.
Perspective is the difference between someone mourning the loss of something in the moment, or feeling a sense of detachment or relief, years later, upon reflection. It informs the entire tone of the piece, or as Stevie Nicks once said, makes songs feel more “romantic”.
Romantic, in this sense, isn’t about love or having somebody in your life, but it’s more about the specific details of a memory or experience, and the ways that you can draw those out of the moment and into something more artistic, meaningful, and timeless. In Nicks’ world, this took the form of her diary, which she typically broke down into two sections: the left and the right.
The left side is reserved for poetry, which she usually takes out of her prose, like a companion piece to the fuller, more detailed story sections, which fall on the right side, recounting certain days, people, memories, or experiences that might find their way into her music at some point.
Because of this approach, Nicks’ songwriting and diaristic expressions often happen alongside each other; her perspective is often shaped around everything she remembers from that specific event, like “the way that the air felt on your skin”, or “the way your hair felt when the wind blew through it”, or “the way that the trees sounded”. Because of this, her songs always have that familiar romanticism about them, because they can immediately place you precisely where she was at the time.
However, other songs come from the subjective nature of perspective itself. Most of Nicks’ best music is the most self-absorbed or navel-gazing type, where she airs her problems or grievances in often harsh or direct ways, though she dusts them off with a dreamlike or euphoric atmosphere that places even the most cutting lines in a blissful, resigned state.
But sometimes, having this attitude challenged or tested can lead to the more emotionally provocative arrangements, the ones that show Nicks experiencing a particular eye-opening moment that makes her writing venture even deeper beneath the surface. This was the case with ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?’, her beautiful ode to Joe Walsh’s three-year-old daughter, who tragically died in a car accident on her way to nursery.
Before she wrote the song, Nicks recalled “complaining about a lot of things”, which Walsh understandably felt was a little disproportionate, not just in terms of what he’d recently been through but when looking at the bigger picture as a whole. In an effort to “make me aware of how unimportant my problems were”, Walsh unknowingly sowed the seed for Nicks’ next masterpiece, telling her that, whenever he’d take his daughter to the park, “the only thing she ever complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain”.
Walsh then took Nicks to the same park and showed her a water fountain with a sign dedicated to his daughter and “all others who were too small to get a drink”. Nicks was so touched by the entire experience and her newfound appreciation for the meticulous perspective of others that the moment she got home, she sat down at her piano and wrote the song in around five minutes.
Understandably, she also felt the weight of the song every time she performed it or looked at the lyrics, once sharing an especially emotional experience when she tried to read it out to her parents. “We all choked up,” she said, “My father, who will not shed a tear, walked out of the room to compose himself”.
A true testament to the way a reshuffle in perspective can grip even those made of stone.
