Like Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell, Nicks wasn’t afraid to share her life with her audience; in fact, she likely saw it as her duty. (Farout)
‘Edge of Seventeen’
This was written right after John Lennon was assassinated,” noted the singer when speaking with Entertainment Weekly. “That was a very scary and sad moment for all of us in the rock and roll business; it scared us all to death that some idiot could be so deranged that he would wait outside your apartment building, never having known you, and shoot you dead.
Nicks later confirmed the song’s other intention: “Right when I got to Phoenix, my uncle Bill got cancer, got very sick very fast, and died in a couple of weeks.” The news left her family devastated: “My cousin John Nicks and I were in the room when he died. There was just John and I there. That was part of the song when I went running down the hallways looking for somebody – I thought, where’s my mum? Where’s his wife and the rest of the family? At that point, I went back to the piano and finished the song.”
‘Landslide’
Their partnered project, Buckingham Nicks, had failed. It was an unavoidable truth that Nicks couldn’t seem to accept. While Lindsey Buckingham was finding work in California’s studio sessions, the singer was struggling to make ends meet and align her career hopes with her prospects. Things were looking bleak.
Staying the “snow covered hills” of Aspen with Buckingham out on tour, Nicks pledged to herself, Buckingham and her family that she would make it work. She would commit to being a musician and live out her life the way she had intended. Incidentally, while doing so, she wrote one of the greatest songs of her career.
‘Storms’
One song, ‘Storms’, isn’t only keenly about one of the many inter-band affairs that occurred but about the sadness, Nicks felt about her own affair with Mick Fleetwood, as Nicks says, “That relationship destroyed Mick’s marriage.”
While other songs in Nicks’ repertoire see the singer opening herself up to the pain of being hurt, she is ready and waiting for criticism on’ Storms’. In fact, you could argue, ‘Storms’ is one track in which Nicks openly criticises herself, acknowledging the damage she caused through her and Fleetwood’s relationship.
It’s far more sullen and exhausted than the rest of her work on the matter and is one of the more vulnerable moments on 1979’s Tusk because of it. For that reason alone, ‘Storms’ sits among Nicks’ best.
Dreams
“I knew when I wrote it that it was really special. I was really not self-conscious or insecure about showing it to the rest of the band.” The recording process was a scene that was worthy of escaping.
‘Dreams’ is a product of that highly-charged situation and sees Nicks firmly aim her now-ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham with unnerving ferocity and marksmanship.
‘Sara’
Fleetwood Mac song ‘Sara’ is incontestably the most personal track that Stevie Nicks has ever written. The Tusk number captures the moment that she was left heartbroken and completely bereft by her bandmate Mick Fleetwood’s infidelity.
The situation led to Nicks starting a cocaine-fuelled affair with her bandmate. She later opened up to Oprah about the ‘doomed’ affair, saying they were the “last two people at a party” and that, “It was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody.”
Writing a song about your lover deserting you for somebody else is always going to be a difficult task, one filled with raw emotion.
At the time, Fleetwood was married to Pattie Boyd’s sister, Jenny Boyd, who had recently cheated on him with his bandmate Bob Weston. Thus, during a rocky period in his relationship, it wasn’t hard for Fleetwood to find himself falling for Nicks.
Although Fleetwood and Nicks’ relationship was an affair, she was still devastated to discover that he had been seeing someone else, a woman named Sara Recor. Fleetwood and Recor eventually married in 1988, and remained a good friend of Nicks, despite the hurt she initially felt.
“I remember -Stevie Nicks Says- the night I wrote it. I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. She likes to think it’s completely about her, but it’s really not completely about her. It’s about me, about her, about Mick, about Fleetwood Mac. It’s about all of us at that point.”
