“You’re dead in the water”: the Stevie Nicks song that proved impossible to perform
Stevie Nicks didn’t step on any stage thinking that she was going to sing whatever was on her mind.
A lot of her songs were all about the subtle feelings that no one could put their finger on, and yet when she got up there with the rest of Fleetwood Mac, she seemed like she was inhabiting every single ounce of energy to help bring her songs to life, to the point where she looked like an absolute witch when singing ‘Rhiannon’. But even if she seemed to have superhuman strength whenever she performed, there were a few songs that she felt would never see the stage.
Then again, Nicks wasn’t the kind of person to throw a bunch of overdubs onto her records if she could help it. Some of her biggest influences were singers who could absolutely level any audience through the power of their voice and a couple of instruments, and no matter how many times Lindsey Buckingham made sonic masterpieces, Nicks’s music was a lot more rudimentary by comparison.
But that’s not meant to be a put-down by any means. Nicks herself had always said that she only knew a handful of chords when she first started performing, but the important part is what she could do with only those few chords. No one could manage to squeeze as much emotion out of ‘Dreams’ as she could, and even if she had the rest of the band behind her, a song like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ pretty much lives and dies on the singer being able to create a certain mood every time they play.
When she got to her solo career, though, it was a much different story. Bella Donna was a more stripped-down record compared to the utter insanity on Tusk, but throughout the 1980s, you could see her working towards making more polished records. She still had that cocksure attitude about her work whenever she performed, but when looking through all the songs she had kept in the vault for so many years, it was hard to think of any of them taking up time onstage whenever she performed.
Sure, it would have been a crime for people not to hear ‘Think About It’ after it was shelved during the sessions for Rumours, but ‘Mabel Normand’ was a much trickier beast. The version that ended up on 24 Karat Gold is absolutely gorgeous, but when looking back on how the song is constructed, Nicks felt that it was nearly impossible to sing it the same way that she did on record when she tried to throw it into the set.
It was nearly impossible for her to catch her breath, so she felt it was best to keep the tune as a piece of recorded art, saying, “It’s all about the syllables. I have a song on my 24 Karat Gold album, ‘Mabel Normand’, that’s exactly the same. That’s the reason we’re not doing it onstage. Because if you take a breath, you get off the beat. You’re one word too late, you can never get back on, and you’re dead in the water.”
And it’s not hard to see where she’s coming from. Lyrics are half the battle when it comes to relating to the audience in a much more profound way, so if she’s not able to articulate everything she’s trying to say properly, she’s better off throwing in a song like ‘Stand Back’ or playing a deep cut than fumbling over her words every single time she tries to play this song.
Because when you think about it, the best songs aren’t the ones that get you flustered the minute that you start playing them. It’s the ones that you feel in your soul before you even sing a note, and if Nicks was too self-conscious about what the song was going to sound like when she got up onstage, it was much better for her to sing something else that came from the heart whenever she came to town.
