The 1985 song Stevie Nicks could never improve on: “Some vocals are magic and simply not able to beat”
It took a lot more than just the right notes for Stevie Nicks to find the right mood for a song.
Even though Lindsey Buckingham helped flesh out a lot of her songs whenever she wrote for Fleetwood Mac, the number-one rule behind all of her greatest tunes was making sure that she could believe it whenever she was singing ‘Gold Dust Woman’ or ‘Gypsy’. She needed to be able to relate to the story that was being told, and while she needed to keep a lot of songs close to the chest, some of the best songs were the ones that seemed to come when all the stars were aligned just right.
But when Nicks made her first solo album, she wasn’t anticipating leaving her band behind altogether. She wanted the chance to get some of her songs out there, but since the rest of the band saw her star rise without them, it was going to be difficult to rein in her solo career and have her devote time to ‘The Mac’ whenever it came time to go back to the studio. Nicks was trying her best to balance everything, but she wasn’t going to leave a great song behind whenever she heard it.
That said, there were a few times where Nicks’s potentially great songs slipped through her fingers. She had already made her fair share of mistakes when she was writing with Tom Petty, but even if she managed to nick one of his chord progressions for the song ‘Ooh My Love’, the fact that she had the chance to record a song like ‘Purple Rain’ and didn’t take it has to be one of the biggest fumbles any artist has ever made.
And yet, maybe it wasn’t. Nicks was always looking for tunes that had more to do with her voice, and while Prince’s magnum opus would have been a stellar addition to her album, she wanted to be able to do justice to the song rather than put together a half-baked attempt at it. She needed something more, and when she began working on records like Rock a Little, ‘I Can’t Wait’ was the kind of songs thta she could have made with her eyes closed.
Rick Nowels may have done most of the heavy lifting when completing the song, but when Nicks went into the studio, there was never any chance that she was going to capture the same type of magic that she did when she sang it the first time, saying, “That Saturday night, Rick and I went into a big studio and recorded it. I sang it only once and have never sung it since in the studio. Some vocals are magic and simply not able to beat. So I let go of it, as new to me as it was, but you know, now when I hear it on the radio, this incredible feeling comes over me, like something really incredible is about to happen. To understand this song, you sort of have to let yourself go a little crazy.”
And that feeling isn’t something that was lost on Nicks over the years. She had already got herself into that kind of headspace when working on ‘Gold Dust Woman’ on Rumours, and the fact that she could manage to capture that same sense of fury all over again was a testament to what the song was pulling out of her whenever she sang it.
In fact, the only thing that was holding the song back in Nicks’s mind was the music video for it. The fact that she wasn’t an actor first didn’t bode well for her, but when she looked at the finished product, Nicks knew that she was going down a dark path. She had lost her way to drugs, and even if she was putting every bit of passion that she could into it, even she couldn’t lie when she saw those vacant eyes on MTV.
But that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from listening to the recorded version of the song. Nicks was still as alive as ever when she had the right idea in front of her, and no one could stop her from making some of the greatest rock and roll songs that she could wrap her voice around whenever she entered the studio.
