The Chicks singer Natalie Maines duetted with her on ‘Too Far from Texas’ and Macy Gray assisted with vocals on ‘Bombay Sapphire’, but Sting was originally Nicks’ first choice.
During an interview with Q in 2001, Nicks revealed: “The only reason Macy is on the record is because we’re managed by the same people. Originally, I wanted Sting to sing that little high part on Bombay Sapphire, but I chickened out on calling him, and I asked Macy to do it.”
Although her management team was responsible for bringing Gray on board with the project, it proved to be a masterstroke, with Nicks adding: “Her vibe is so wild, so intense. She walks into the room, and it’s like everything starts to move. She’s like a walking tornado. She’s a total blast. We had a great time working on the song. Our voices blended so well together.”
Sting may have never been approached to appear on ‘Bombay Sapphire’, but Nicks has no regrets about how the track panned out. However, at one stage, the track almost didn’t make the final cut of Trouble in Shangri-La due to issues with the recording. Nicks was left “horrified” because it contained a message of the utmost importance to her, but thankfully it was resurrected.
She explained: “My personal favourite [song on Trouble in Shangri-La] is ‘Bombay Sapphire.’ When it says, ‘I can see past you to the white sand,’ that sentence right there is the whole reason for ‘Bombay Sapphire.’ It means that I’m really trying to get over something, and though I’m freaked out about it, I’m looking to the green ocean and can see past all of these problems to the incredibly beautiful white sand and the ocean beyond it. I’m gonna be okay because I am movin’ past you.”
Stevie Nicks explains the meaning behind the ‘velvet underground’ lyric in ‘Gypsy’
The song references the time before Nicks was famous, when she lived with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. They slept on a mattress on the floor of their shared apartment and shopped at thrift stores.
“In 1968, Lindsey and I lived in San Francisco, and we were in a really good band that was opening for pretty much all of the San Francisco bands that were very, very famous at that time,” Nicks said, naming musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, and Creedence Clearwater among the artists she had opened for. “We were really, like, living the dream,” she said. “We were young, and it was just fantastic.” (Cheatsheet)
The velvet underground referenced in “Gypsy” was a clothing store. “There was a rumor that there was a store in downtown San Francisco where all the rock and roll girls got their clothes, the ones that could afford it. And I thought well, I’m saving my money, so I will go up there and I will buy myself something at this fantastic store. And this store was called The Velvet Underground"
“So I went up there and I found the store, and I walked into this really beautiful store with really beautiful things that I was pretty much sure there was nothing I could really afford there,” the singer described. “But I was standing where I absolutely knew that Janis Joplin stood. And I was feeling the love.”
“And when I left that store without anything, I was a different person,” Nicks said. “Because I knew at that point that my dream was going to come true even though the whole rest of the world – my world – was saying it’s never gonna happen.”
There is also a tragedy behind Stevie Nicks' song 'Gypsy'
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.”
