Nicks originally wrote “Gypsy” for her solo debut Bella Donna but felt it was a much better Fleetwood Mac song. Upon release, the song hit No. 12 and was accompanied by a video directed by Russell Mulcahy. Originally, “Gypsy” ran five and a half minutes, but the version on the album runs slightly shorter at four minutes, 24 seconds. The longer version was later released on the band’s 1992 retrospective box set 25 Years—The Chain. (Americansongwriter)
“That’s Alright” was an older track, she wrote back in the Buckingham Nicks, while “Straight Back,” which became a hit on rock radio, was written in 1981 and references Nicks’ separation from producer Jimmy Iovine and breaking from her solo career to return to Fleetwood Mac.
A tragedy would later ensure that the song saw the light of day with Fleetwood Mac following the sad death of Nicks’ best friend Robin Anderson, as Nicks viewed the tale of a trailblazing woman baring her inner fearlessness as a fitting tribute.(Faroutmagazine)
As Nicks told US Magazine in 1990: “Robin was one of the few women who ever got leukaemia and then got pregnant. And they had to take the baby [named Matthew] at six-and-a-half months, and then she died two days later. And when she died, I went crazy. I just went insane. And so did her husband. And we were the only two that could really understand the depth of the grief that we were going through.”
Unable to reconcile their grief, Nicks and her late friend’s husband, Kim Anderson, would later marry. As Nicks explains: “I was determined to take care of that baby, so I said to Kim, ‘I don’t know, I guess we should just get married.’ And so we got married three months after she died, and it was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way that we could feel like we were doing anything. And we got divorced three months later.”
