The 2003 song Stevie Nicks couldn’t stand performing: “She thought it was dirty”
The entire point of being in a band like Fleetwood Mac was about the kind of tension Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had to a certain degree.
The band were already one of the greatest blues acts to come out of England, but when looking at their pedigree with both Buckingham and Nicks in the group, there wasn’t a soul who wasn’t looking to see the kind of drama that they would get up to whenever they went onstage. But even if a lot of that was water under the bridge after decades apart, Nicks realised that there were some tunes that she still wasn’t giving her approval to.
She had a clear idea of what she wanted to be every time she sang, and she knew for a fact that she wasn’t going to go along singing songs about how she was terrible in her and Buckingham’s relationship. She had only begrudgingly gone through a song like ‘Go Your Own Way’, but after getting her heart broken by having to cut ‘Silver Springs’, Nicks was livid at the idea of staying in the band for years on end and not having any time to devote to her solo career.
Buckingham may have officially ended their time together after Tango in the Night, but even after The Dance, fans were still looking to get the slightest glimpse of what the band were all about. Nicks was quite happy going about her business with her solo career, but after management gave her the idea of making an album with the original lineup again, Say You Will was an album that seemed almost too big an opportunity to pass up.
After all, half of the record had already been written thanks to Buckingham making a new record, but that was also half the reason why the record didn’t work in her mind. Since the whole record is 18 tracks long, the whole thing feels more like a Nicks and Buckingham solo album that has been smashed up against each other. That could work in some respects, but the idea of making a song that was suggestive was one step over the line.
Nicks had already been pissed after realising that the song ‘Tusk’ was about genitalia, so she wasn’t going to take any chances when Buckingham came to the studio with a song called ‘Come’, with the guitarist recalling, “I asked her to sing on the song ‘Come’ and she wouldn’t. I think she thought it was dirty. That tells you something about someone who has been a rock icon but in some ways is still quite a conservative person. And I don’t see her as someone who has lived her life very conservatively.”
But even if the song was perfectly innocent, that didn’t mean that Nicks had to be singing on everything. There were already countless Fleetwood Mac songs where she didn’t have to be the centre of attention, and when you think about it, a lot of her songs on the record actually benefit from being completely fleshed out without Buckingham working his way in and making it his own behind the scenes.
A song like ‘Illume’ was already going to be a massive song for her after the events of 9/11, and while she could have easily turned it into the traditional Mac-style sing-along, it was better for her to leave it alone and make the whole thing sound sombre. Buckingham was the perfectionist trying to make every single record sound great, but for a song with this heavy a subject matter, it was much better to capture the feeling than anything else.
So while Buckingham could spend as much time working on ‘Come’ as he wanted to, Nicks was happy not to get her hands dirty with songs that had a bit of a nasty edge to them. She had been burned by that once before, and she was not about to make the same mistake she had made back in the day.
