The best singing soulmate Stevie Nicks ever had: “This is just perfect”
For Stevie Nicks, singing with someone meant a lot more than finding the right song to represent their voices.
Music had a far more intimate feeling for her whenever she sang, and she wanted the opportunity for every song to sound absolutely magical when she had the right person to bounce off of. Sometimes it would be Sheryl Crow, and sometimes she would have to try and avoid screaming at Lindsey Buckingham in between takes, but the right kind of singing partner usually made everything else in the world melt away for a few seconds.
And it’s not like Nicks didn’t know that kind of power firsthand. The recording of a song like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ is still one of the most atmospheric vocals that she ever laid down, and even when she was working on someone else’s tune, she could bring a certain power to a song like ‘Little Lies’ that Christine McVie never could have when she started singing. But she was always going to feel more free when she broke out of the Fleetwood Mac machine.
It’s not that ‘The Mac’ were grating on her or anything, but she didn’t want to feel held back by anything when she was writing her songs. She needed the world to hear how she was feeling, and when Bella Donna came out, she had the perfect people to work off of her when Jimmy Iovine walked into the studio. He knew how to make fantastic records, and the idea of getting people like Don Henley to sing on the record was a match made in rootsy rock heaven.
But if there was anyone that Nicks wanted to hear on her album, it was Tom Petty. She had the idea of being a member of the Heartbreakers since the days of Fleetwood Mac, but when she sang the song ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, hearing her voice harmonising with Petty’s felt better than she could have ever imagined. After working with ‘The Mac’ for so long, she felt that she finally had a musical soulmate to sing with.
Their relationship was always completely platonic, but Nicks felt that Petty’s voice was made for hers by the time she worked on turns like ‘I Will Run To You’, saying, “Tom and I love to sing together, and we’ve really developed this relationship, and I’m not really very interested in developing relationships with other men singers, because this is just perfect: we sing well, we have a great time, we complement each other. I love his songwriting, perfect, why bother?”
And the same applies to many of the songs that Petty sang with Nicks on backing vocals. The song ‘Insider’ was already meant to be a vehicle for Nicks’s voice when Petty started singing it, but when she sang a harmony over the top when she was presented with the tune, Petty knew it was too beautiful for him to give away when it started developing. When someone’s singing is that powerful, though, Petty wasn’t going to just walk away from it either.
Even though he and Nicks had two completely different careers, they almost made it a point to sing together whenever they had the opportunity. Whether it was Nicks showing up during Petty’s shows to sing tunes like ‘Needles and Pins’ or Petty throwing the odd tune her way when working on her records, the heartland rocker became almost like the older brother that Nicks needed in the music business.
Petty might be long gone from this world, but the fact that Nicks’s first thought for replacing Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac was Mike Campbell tells you a lot about what the Heartbreakers meant to her. She was the only girl who could claim to have joined Petty’s band, and if she had a piece of the band with her at all times, it was as if Petty never truly left whenever she sang one of his tunes.
