“You couldn’t tell me anything”: the song Stevie Nicks refused to release for years
There has always been a certain intimacy that comes with listening to any Stevie Nicks album. Whereas a Fleetwood Mac album can feel like listening to three different solo albums being folded in on each other at times, there is no doubt that Nicks meant 100% of what she was singing whenever she went into the studio to cut songs like ‘Stand Back’ or ‘The Edge of Seventeen’. While she was always offered different takes on her own songs, there were times when Nicks wasn’t willing to compromise.
Because if there’s one thing Nicks needed to prove, it was that she was a songwriter in her own right. She had already faced the ridicule of Lindsey Buckingham claiming to write the lion’s share of her songs for her, so when she struck out with Bella Donna, she finally had the freedom to make songs that were far more original than any Fleetwood Mac project. Although ‘After the Glitter Fades’ and ‘Leather and Lace’ were beautiful, it was clear they would have never worked for her old band.
So, when she went into her next projects, she made a point of having songs that were completely separate from Fleetwood Mac. The whole point behind her solo career was to show a different side of herself, after all, and while she was more than happy to take a few cues from Tom Petty when the time called for it, bringing in Warren Zevon for one of her songs was one step over the line for her.
Granted, it’s not like Zevon was some up-and-coming talent who needed to prove his worth by any stretch. He had already become one of the biggest names in music behind the scenes, and considering what Linda Ronstadt had done with tracks like ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’, getting a tune written by him was the equivalent of getting a song doctor working on one of her tracks.
That might have suited Ronstadt fine, but Nicks remembered feeling uncomfortable when she had a song called ‘Reconsider Me’ come across her desk, saying, “Warren Zevon wrote it, and, of course, I love Warren because I’ve known Warren since before Lindsey and I joined Fleetwood Mac. He brought this song to me. Jimmy thought it was a very important song for me to do. It was that kind of a career-changing song. You couldn’t tell me anything in 1985, and I just really didn’t want to do another person’s song. I did record it [but] I pulled it because it wasn’t one of my songs.”
Granted, it’s not like Nicks was aching for more songs by any stretch. Looking back on this era of her career, tunes like ‘I Can’t Wait’ and ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’ are among the greatest tunes that she has ever made, but maybe some of the subject matter of the Zevon hit too close to home.
You have to remember that this was also the era when Nicks was going through some heavy drug problems. Considering her unstable relationship with Iovine at the time, a song that was all about asking for forgiveness was not really reflective of her frame of mind. After all, she already had to sing on a song on Rumours that claimed that she was shacking up with everyone, so she was not about to use a song to tell someone else’s perspective again.
But if the version that turned up on the box set Enchanted is anything to go on, we missed out on one of her most vulnerable tunes. From the background vocals from Don Henley to Nicks’s frail vocal delivery, this is among the best versions of a Zevon song ever committed to tape and is well deserving of standing next to the rest of the songs on Rock a Little.
