Stevie Nicks is one of the most successful and acclaimed singers and songwriters of all time – but in the mid-’90s she wasn’t feeling like it.
She was out of Fleetwood Mac, the band in which she had become famous. And she had endured a gruelling period suffering from Epstein-Barr virus, a debilitating condition causing profound fatigue.
In her absence, Fleetwood Mac weren’t doing too good either. Their 1995 album Time was a disaster, a commercial flop that would later be ranked by music writer Colin Larkin at No 10 in his list of the All-Time Worst Albums Ever Made.
But while Nicks was plotting her return to the band, she was also attempting to write songs for a solo album. And in that respect she was failing – until a conversation over dinner with her favourite fellow rock star put her back on track.
Tom Petty had been a close friend of hers since the late ’70s, and the success of her debut solo album Bella Donna in 1981 was driven by the single Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around, a duet by Nicks with Petty and his band The Heartbreakers, written by Petty and lead guitarist Mike Campbell.
In a interview with Q magazine in 2001, to promote her solo album Trouble In Shangri-La, Nicks revealed how the impetus for that album came from a pep talk from Petty.
She recalled: “In 1995 I had dinner with Tom and I was complaining a lot – because Epstein-Barr makes you so tired, you don’t have a lot of get up and go.
“You know, Tom is a good friend of mine. We’re close like a brother and sister, so he can say stuff to me that nobody else really can. And when he says something to me I know he means it and I know he’s looking out for me.
“I said, ‘Will you help me get started on this? Will you help me write some songs?’ And he got really angry with me. He said I wasn’t appreciating all that I’d done and how hard I’d worked all these years.
“He said, ‘Yeah, you’ve had a couple of bad years, but it’s okay. You need to go home and go on a mission – reinvent yourself, write some new songs. You’re one of the best songwriters I know. You don’t need my help. You don’t need anybody’s help!’
“So I did it. I followed that advice. I went home that night and said to everybody: ‘This is it – I’m starting a new record.’”
The fact that it took all of six years for that record to be released was due to Nicks reuniting with Fleetwood Mac in 1997.
This saw the return of the band’s most successful line-up, as featured on multi-million selling albums such as Rumours and Tango In The Night – with Nicks alongside drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboard player and lead vocalist Christine McVie, and guitarist and lead vocalist Lindsey Buckingham.
The band’s comeback show at Warner Studios in Burbank, California was recorded for a live album, The Dance, released on 19 August 1997.
When Nicks spoke to Q for the release of Trouble In Shangri-La, she also discussed other famous friends, including Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love, Prince and one of her ex-partners, Don Henley.
Sheryl Crow was a key collaborator on Trouble In Shangri-La, after she and Nicks had worked together on songs for the soundtrack to the 1998 movie Practical Magic.
“The first time I really met Sheryl was at a Don Henley benefit dinner,” Nicks said. “I said I would really love it if she could do some production on this record.
“When I got a call about doing a song for the Practical Magic movie, I really didn’t want to do it, but Sheryl said that she would produce, and that’s when our relationship was really cemented.
“She’s like Tom Petty. She’s the second person in my life who’s a rock star who I am becoming very good friends with. I can’t pull anything with Sheryl, nor her with me. It’s a very grounding thing.
“And I can give her advice because I’ve already gone through everything she could possibly think of going through. I try to save her from as much as I can. She’s become like a beloved little sister.”
Nicks said that she and Courtney Love became acquainted around the time that Love’s band Hole recorded the 1998 album Celebrity Skin.
“She sent the record to me before it came out,” Nicks said, “and I was like, ‘Oh my God, what if I don’t like it?’ What are you going to tell your friend? But I was very pleasantly surprised. The songs were really well crafted. I was surprised.”
She admitted, however, that she and Love had not stayed in contact.
“Courtney and I would be friends if we spent time together,” she said, “but when the Fleetwood Mac thing happened again my whole life was sucked away and I had no time to do anything. I didn’t see her for a while, and what happens is you drift. If you don’t work on your friendships, they drift away.”
Nicks fondly reminisced about her brief love affair with Don Henley, whom she dated in 1976, when she was enjoying her first taste of stardom with Fleetwood Mac and he was working on the Eagles’ most famous album. The pair later performed a duet on the ballad Leather And Lace from her Bella Donna album.
“When I was with Don he was right at the end of the recording of Hotel California,” she said. “And you know, the Eagles really taught Fleetwood Mac how to spend money. We had them to emulate.
“One time Don sent a little cranberry-red Learjet to pick me up somewhere and fly me to New York from a Fleetwood Mac gig. It waited on the ground for me to fly back the next day so I could make my gig. That was one of the first things that had me thinking, ‘Being a rock star really is wild!’ That was in 1976. A year before I was waiting on tables.
“My relationship was Don was really nice but it didn’t last because we were both really famous rock stars. It was too hard. But we really did care about each other and we still do. Today, I consider Don one of my closest friends. So it lasted.”
In the Q interview, Nicks also made an amusing observation about Prince.
In 1983, they had worked together on her song Stand Back, which had been inspired by his earlier hit Little Red Corvette.
Prince played synthesisers on Nicks’s song, but was never officially credited for his contribution.
Nicks told Q of a disagreement they’d had.
As she recalled it: “Prince is overtly sexual. I am very quietly sexual. That’s the difference. Prince wants to be outrageous and flamboyant, always.
“I told him, ‘I do write about sex – you’re just not hearing it because you’re looking for this overt thing – and that’s not what I’m about.’”
