The tour that drove Stevie Nicks back into the studio: “I got my confidence back”
There are many things that can drive artists away from performing and recording, but when you’re as beloved as someone like Stevie Nicks, it’s often hard to see why someone might choose to retire from the public eye.
Despite being characterised by chaotic inter-band relationships spiralling out of control, Nicks’ tenure in Fleetwood Mac was a largely positive experience in terms of helping her grow as an artist. Prior to joining the band, she had struggled to capture the attention of audiences, with Buckingham Nicks having only sold modestly despite having caught the attention of Mick Fleetwood, but even the band were ambivalent about her joining alongside her then-partner, Lindsey Buckingham.
The period where Nicks was present in Fleetwood Mac was also the band’s most fruitful period, owing to the fact that they’d nailed down a style that was appealing to a wider audience and tapped into contemporary styles rather than leaning too hard into the blues rock ethos they’d formed on. Their earlier material had been impressive, but failed to make an impression on the mainstream in the same way that their material from the mid-1970s onwards did.
However, despite this seeming like a match made in heaven, Nicks chose to leave the band in 1990 after recording Behind the Mask, with Christine McVie departing shortly after her. It appeared as though the band were slowly dissolving after years of tumultuous relationships behind the scenes, and since Nicks had already built a solid foundation for herself as a solo artist by this point, it seemed like the right direction for her to take.
The expectation was that this popularity in her own right would continue to carry her, but her own output would eventually become a lot more infrequent, and she ended up rejoining Fleetwood Mac in 1997, despite their own lack of studio activity at the time.
After the release of 2001’s Trouble in Shangri-La, Nicks appeared to fall off entirely, and it then took her a decade to return to releasing her own material. It seemed like the world had chosen to inconveniently forget about Nicks and Fleetwood Mac at the same time, so what was it that changed her mind to be able to make such a dramatic return at the start of the 2010s?
In a 2011 interview with Clash, Nicks noted that two tours completely reversed the outlook she’d developed about her place in the music industry. “When we came off the road from Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will tour in 2005, I was going to make a record but I was told not to bother by the powers that be,” the singer noted. “Everybody was depressed by the downturn in the music industry and I was not the fighter I usually am. I just believed what they said, that no-one would want to hear a Stevie Nicks album and went with it.”
However, embarking on the Unleashed tour with the band in 2009, their fortunes had seemingly done a u-turn. “I got my confidence back and decided I was going to hit the ground running the second I got home and start an album,” she continued. “I needed to do it for my soul as I’ve always made a record every couple of years.”
Perhaps she had all but resigned herself to her career being over, but there’s always a possibility of things coming back around or there being a renewed interest in older acts. If she could make a grand return with Fleetwood Mac, then there was no reason that she couldn’t do the same to revitalise her solo career, and her grand return in 2011 with In Your Dreams did exactly that.
