Stevie Nicks picks her favourite track: “It’s my sexiest song”

Stevie Nicks, the singer of Fleetwood Mac, has crafted a series of beloved tracks that have become deeply ingrained in broader culture, yet she no longer holds sole ownership over them.

When Nicks stepped alone for the first time in 1981 with her debut solo offering, Bella Donna, she’d already enjoyed astronomical success with Fleetwood Mac. Instead, her new project was primarily fuelled by creative desires rather than to enhance her name value further.

With Bella Donna, Nicks proved she could more than stand on her own two feet artistically. Furthermore, the album contains ‘How Still My Love (In The Still of The Night)’, the song she crowned as her personal favourite for the entirety of her career.

“This is my favourite song; it’s called in ‘In The Still Of The Night’,” Nicks once said of the track during a live performance, while getting the name of the song incorrect. While the song isn’t as widely cherished as hits such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, which also appeared on the LP, it occupies a special place in the singer-songwriter’s heart.

When Bella Donna was released, in an interview, Nicks highlighted it as a personal favourite, noting: “‘Still of the Night’ was really probably one of my most romantic songs, I really wrote that about…I was feeling really romantic at the time. It’s my sexiest song. I love to sit and play it. It’s the vibe-iest song.”

Further illustrating her love for the track, Nicks explained that it was the only non-negotiable song on Bella Donna that she wasn’t prepared to remove from the album.

She continued: “It’s the one song I said had to be on the album, and it was the one that went in and out and in and out and off and on and off and on the album in the last four months, incredibly, until finally I knew that it would come around to people realising it’s really such a neat song even if it’s for yourself to enjoy it.”

“I’m always going to write about the bouquets and the flowers [laughs]. But ‘How Still My Love’ really is a sexy song, and being that it’s one of my few sexy songs, when we do it onstage, it’s fun. It’s kind of woozy and it’s slow, but it’s got a really great beat—kind of a strip-tease, a little burlesque, a little Dita Von Teese-y.”