The one 1970s band Stevie Nicks fell in love with: “Their friend”
Anything that Stevie Nicks ever made needed to have a fair degree of emotion behind it.
She didn’t get into this business trying to make the catchiest tunes of all time, and while getting a lot of hits out of Fleetwood Mac was awfully good, her main objective was to have people latch onto her songs above everything else. She needed to feel like she was having a conversation with the audience, but sometimes her greatest musical loves took priority over everything else she was doing.
Because the quickest way to Nicks’s heart was hearing someone that was being authentic throughout their music. She knew that her favourite artists weren’t going to suddenly be going along with the trends of the day, and even when she was working with Lindsey Buckingham , there was an inherent trust between them that all of their songs were going to be done for the pure love of creating.
But by the time that Fleetwood Mac had been playing for a while, it’s no surprise why Nicks wanted to leave. The idea of continuing to be in a band with Buckingham the rest of her life wasn’t her idea of a good time, and when you listen to her first solo record, you can hear her finally free to do whatever she wanted. She needed the chance to make something new, and that involved getting the right people in her corner.
Buckingham might have been a little bit pissed to see members of Eagles working on her record, but Nicks felt there was no need for them to be at odds with one of the biggest bands in California. She knew that every person she picked would make the project better, but having Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on one of her tracks was enough for her to reconsider her position in Fleetwood Mac.
Nicks already made a promise to herself that she was never going to be the one to break up the band during Rumours, but the heartland rocker may have been the only person to change her mind. They were making the best music that she had ever heard, and while she couldn’t accept being in a band with them over her main outfit, it took her a while before she actually got to say thank you to them.
The Heartbreakers were her one musical love, and ‘If You Were My Love’ was a tribute to the kind of feelings she had working with them, saying in 1981, “It’s like a love song, but it’s not. It’s about going outside your own life and getting attached to something that isn’t yours. It’s been kind of like falling in love with another band — for a minute. It has nothing to do with — and truly, clarify this — there is absolutely nothing going on between me and anybody in that band. They’re all married. They’re all expecting babies. That’s what makes it very easy for me to be with them and be their friend, and almost be one of the guys.”
And when you look at how her career played out, Nicks always kept that promise as well. Everyone might have thought that she and Petty were soulmates whenever they sang, but Petty was more of an older brother figure than anything else. He was the one helping to keep her in line and making sure that she was in the business for the right reasons, and if ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ needed to run something by anyone, Petty was normally the first person that she would call.
That kind of relationship doesn’t come around very often in the music industry, so Nicks knew that she had to savour it while it lasted. Because while anyone else would have wanted to tear down everyone else on the charts, Petty was one of the few authentic artists that seemed genuinely interested in seeing where her career would be going once he stopped playing on her records.
