Why did Stevie Nicks go solo despite saying she “never wanted” to?
Stevie Nicks has always been a relentlessly creative soul who, since her youth, desperately needed an output for her work. For the Fleetwood Mac singer, art is a necessity to life rather than a job, and even if it weren’t her career, she’d still be finding ways to artistically express herself.
During a conversation with Rolling Stone in 2019, Nicks discussed her earliest memories of performing and explained how it’s in her blood. She said: “I started singing when I was in fourth grade: R&B, all the Shirelles’ songs and the Supremes and the Shangri-Las. All those amazing songs Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote. That was my diving board for singing as a little girl.”
Since that moment of performing to her classmates for the first time in the fourth grade, Nicks developed a thirst to step on stage and absorbed herself in music. In high school, the singer started to chase her dream more aggressively with the band Fritz, who had the honour of opening for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
After they disbanded, Nicks formed a duo with her Fritz bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, and they were subsequently signed to a major record label. However, after their debut album flopped, the pair were dropped, and before the opportunity to join Fleetwood Mac arrived, it seemed music would return to being a hobby.
Even when her chips were down, it never crossed Nicks’ mind to embark on a solo career. However, a few years into her tenure with Fleetwood Mac, Nicks decided to start recording a solo album which became 1981’s Bella Donna despite the group still being together.
From the outside, it seemed Nicks’ decision to go her own way was to have the limelight all to herself, but the reality was incredibly different. She is a creative who operates at 100mph, and in Fleetwood Mac, the songwriting duties are shared between multiple people, which meant Nicks had an entire collection of material she couldn’t find a home for but needed the world to hear.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019 about balancing her solo career with Fleetwood Mac duties, Nicks revealed: “My solo career is much more girlie. It’s still a hard rock band — but it’s much more girlie-girl than Fleetwood Mac is. I never wanted a solo career — I always wanted to be just in a band. But I just had so many songs! Because when you’re in a band with three prolific writers, you get two or three songs per album — maybe four. But I was writing all the time, so they just went into my Gothic trunk of lost songs.”
It’s not only music that Nicks uses as an avenue for her creativity, with poetry also taking up a portion of her output. She continued: “Christine would walk by me — my totally sarcastic best friend. She’d say [imitation of Christine McVie’s English accent]. ‘Soooo. Writing another song, are we?’ To this day, I write all the time. I have a poem that I’ve written about Game of Thrones, and I have a really beautiful poem that I’m writing about Anthony Bourdain.”
Many lead vocalists decide to make a solo album as an excuse to break away from their band and establish themselves as a star in their own right, but that was never the motivation for Nicks. Instead, she was fuelled purely by her relentless creative urge and a longing to get her songs released.
