Quite literally everyone from Prince to Joe Walsh has been among her artistic relationships, so it should come as no surprise that Jon Bon Jovi once wrote a song for Stevie Nicks and, with that, sang it with her too. The song in question is ‘Sometimes It’s a Bitch’. (Faroutmagazine)
Later, when reflecting on the song, Stevie Nicks said of hearing the material for the first time: “When I first heard this song, I really did not quite understand what Jon was trying to say, but over the two weeks that we sang it together (at my mike), I started to realise that Jon, without knowing it, had sort of taken a time machine back 18 years and watched my life, the good parts and the bad.”
Nicks continued: “It was not a love song, which of course, I had expected it to be; it was much more than that to me. Bon Jovi had picked up on the fact, before meeting me, that there was no way he could know what I had lived through without having lived through it with me, so he dreamed.”
“He dreamed about what the notorious Stevie Nicks had been like and what it had all done to her… the indulgences, the lifestyle. I felt that if he knew nothing else about me, he knew I had a strong instinct to survive. Someday, maybe all the people who did not go through this with us will understand; that considering the generation we come from, we are very lucky to be alive.”
It’s an incredibly wholesome message, especially when you consider the juxtaposition of the lyrics from the title of the song, singing lines like, “You gotta take it as it comes/ Sometimes it don’t come easy” and “Sometimes it’s a bitch/ Sometimes it’s a breeze/ Sometimes love’s blind/ And sometimes it sees.”
By the mid-1980s, Nicks was still seemingly on the top of her professional game with the release of Rock A Little in 1985, but this period marked a notably dark moment for the singer.
Shortly after the tour supporting the album, Nicks joined Bob Dylan on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Australia. Just before leaving for Australia, Nicks was warned by a plastic surgeon of health problems or death if she didn’t stop her cocaine habit. She recalled the conversation on The Chris Isaak Hour in 2009: “I said, ‘What do you think about my nose?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think the next time you do a hit of cocaine, you could drop dead.'”
Nicks recalled that in the mid-1980s, she would regularly take drugs on the set of her music videos. But one video that she really can’t stomach in hindsight is ‘I Can’t Wait’ from Rock A Little. “I look at that video, I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, ‘Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days, so you could have looked a little better?'” she stated in the book I Want My MTV. “It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself.”
