The song Stevie Nicks called “the most exciting thing I ever heard”
Most of the best songs Stevie Nicks ever made were based on instinct. Though it’s hard to call a song like ‘Dreams’ intricate since it only features two chords, the main draw of her songs is about creating an atmosphere with sound that she can lay her poetry over the top of whenever the time calls for it. She could still rock when she wanted to, and she knew she was onto something amazing when looking at the song ‘I Can’t Wait’ for the first time.
Because as much as Nicks provided a great rapport with Fleetwood Mac, she was begging to go solo from the minute that Tusk wrapped up. Even a double album of new material wasn’t going to satisfy every single songwriter, and despite being one of the best in her field, only having five songs on a record was never going to be enough for Nicks to tell her full story.
Although Bella Donna was more in line with the rootsy rock that she had wanted to do in the first place, Rock a Little marked a bit of a turning point in her career. There was a lot of new production, she had a lot more experience under her belt, but mostly, there was a ton of cocaine lying around the studio.
Then again, that wasn’t new for Nicks. Ever since the days of Fleetwood Mac, each group member was known to indulge just a little bit, but this was where Nicks was becoming known for completely blacking out, to the point where she didn’t even recognise herself in some of her older videos. She could still point out what kind of songs worked, though, and ‘I Can’t Wait’ got her right from the opening drum beat.
When she was collaborating with musician Rick Nowels, the opening groove that he laid was what hooked her in immediately, saying, “I think this was about the most exciting song that I had ever heard. My friend, Rick (Nowels), whom I had known since I was 18 and he was 13, brought over this track with this incredible percussion thing, and he asked me if I would consider writing a song for it. I pretended not to be that knocked out, but the second Rick left, I ran to my little recording studio and wrote ‘I Can’t Wait.’”
Despite Fleetwood Mac going through their own amount of shakeups when working on their 1980s albums like Mirage, this feels like Nicks trying to blend both parts of her musical personality. If anything, ‘I Can’t Wait’ is the natural progression of what she was doing on tracks like ‘Gypsy’, only with a lot more percussion behind it that even Mick Fleetwood probably couldn’t pull off.
Even so, this marks a bit of a slump for Nicks’s solo career, leading to her trying to fight her way out of her cocaine-induced haze and find a way to write classics again. While she would have more hits with and without ‘The Mac’ behind her, sometimes the likes of ‘I Can’t Wait’ just serve as the light shining through all of the darkness.
