The two songs Stevie Nicks never gets tired of playing: “Those were a part of my life”
After a while, every song an artist writes can feel like a musical child. No one can claim to be the same person they were when writing those songs while in their early 20s, but sometimes the best compositions can act as a composite time machine that transports them back to those days for however lost the tune lasts. Although Stevie Nicks may have a few memories tied up with Fleetwood Mac that she would rather forget, there are always going to be pieces of her soul in her music no one can take away.
Then again, Nicks’s greatest songs were all based on what was on her mind and in her heart at the time. She never minced any of her words when making her greatest tunes, and even when she would have rather been anywhere than in the studio with Lindsey Buckingham during the making of Rumours, hearing her take the high road on songs like ‘Dreams’ were the best way for her to commemorate that relationship.
As much as she loved the idea of being the frontwoman of a band, though, Tusk was the first time she started to wonder if she could really say everything she needed today. She would always have a prime spot on the record for one of her songs, but she knew that what she was doing was worth more than a casual vocal cameo on an album or a handful of album cuts to fill out the record.
She knew she could fly on her own, and while Bella Donna may not have been easy for the rest of Fleetwood Mac to stomach, it was something that she needed to get out of her system. And once she started having hits with tunes like ‘Edge of Seventeen’, she had finally found her groove, writing the kind of spiritually uplifting that felt like her witch persona fully realised half the time.
Although one solo album would have been enough to satiate her, having tracks like ‘Stand Back’ under her belt was proof that she was a tour de force in her own right. She had once thought that she wasn’t even good enough to join Fleetwood Mac, but through the help of producer Jimmy Iovine and some of the best lyrics she ever wrote, she had become a big enough presence to rival them on the charts half the time.
And despite playing her solo tours as much as ‘The Mac’s songs these days, Nicks said that she would never get tired of two of her solo hits, saying, “I couldn’t have been more thrilled to walk onstage every night and be able to do all these other songs I love, but of course, I’ll never get tired of doing ‘Edge of Seventeen’ or ‘Stand Back’. Those songs were a part of my life for so long that I would never take that away from people.”
That’s only scratching the surface of her career, though. Outside of the massive hits, tracks like ‘Has Anybody Ever Written Anything For You’ are some of the most heartbreaking pieces of her catalogue, and even when she returned to Fleetwood Mac periodically during the 1980s, tunes like ‘Seven Wonders’ saw her balancing her styles perfectly as if she knew that she needed to satisfy both her old fans and the newcomers who had hopped on the bandwagon through ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’.
It was never going to be an easy decision for Nicks to go solo, but songs like ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ proved that she could work both sides of the rock and roll spectrum. It was fun being the frontwoman of a group, but by showing her true colours in her solo career, people got a look at the real person underneath all of the witchy garb.
