“Very sad”: The album Stevie Nicks never got to enjoy
Life doesn’t clear the way for anything or anyone. No matter what the event or experience, the nature of living is that things will keep getting in the way and force the path to wind, whether literally or, in Stevie Nicks’ case, emotionally.
To be alive is essentially just to be pushed from crisis to crisis, and while that is utterly morbid and pessimistic, it’s true. There will rarely be a period in life where absolutely everything is going according to plan, and if that happens, it will likely be the time you will need to steel yourself for whatever the next surprise will be.
Fate loves to throw you off-course or throw a curveball into the mix at exactly the wrong moment, and Stevie Nicks navigated many of them. Right when she first joined Fleetwood Mac, looking ahead at what she thought was going to be a clear run of success alongside her long-term partner, envisioning a future of tours and albums and doing it all hand-in-hand and in love, they split.
Suddenly, the path had hurdles, like trying to navigate the difficult heartbreak with her ex right there next to her.
The curveballs kept coming. In 1978, life sent her another surprise when she fell into an affair with Mick Fleetwood, bringing even more turmoil to the band dynamics when things with Buckingham were just starting to settle. In 1979, it kept coming as she became pregnant during her relationship with Don Henley.
Suddenly, life split off into two paths as the decision of what she would do hung ahead of her. Ultimately, she decided to choose a child-free life, stating later, “My mission may not have been to be a mom and a wife; maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better”.
But sometimes, a surprise crosses your course that is nothing but pure grief in a moment when things should have been clear and happy, or when an exciting achievement should have been a moment of celebration. Nicks experienced that clearest in 1981 when the release of her debut solo album quickly became unimportant as she suffered the loss of her best friend, Robin Anderson.
“When Bella Donna came out, Fleetwood Mac was at the top of their game. It was the most incredible time. Then my best friend, Robin, was diagnosed with leukaemia, and that overshadowed everything. I really didn’t get to enjoy Bella Donna,” she said as the fear surrounding her friend’s ill-health took over everything else.
At every step, the release of the record seemed to run parallel to her grief. “I found out that Robin was dying on the same day it went number one,” she recalled.
Moments of crisis like this put things into perspective “That should’ve been a time when I was the most happy and felt the most self-confident and successful,” she said, reflecting on how she once thought success like that would make everything better, “But actually, I really felt the most helpless, because all the money in the world couldn’t save this woman’s life.” The world was throwing her a stark reminder that no amount of fame or notoriety could come above friendship and the weight of emotions attached to our human connections.
“It was a very sad, yet balancing, thing for me,” Nicks concluded, and forevermore, Bella Donna sounded like that lesson.
