(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 14 June 2025 16:30, UK
Any musician is playing with fire when they decide to break free from their mainline group. It’s one thing to be able to have a great foundation to work with, but the second that you decide to go solo, you’re opening up to criticism that you can’t share with another four or five people. If it all went south for Stevie Nicks, she was bound to go back to Fleetwood Mac feeling defeated, but the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ was always bound to have more to offer than the mystical side of Rumours.
Before she even got her solo deal, Nicks already had plans for what a career on her own would sound like. Anyone who had worked with their ex during the making of an album was bound to think about times when they didn’t have to answer to them, and when Tusk eventually dropped, it’s no surprise that Nicks was getting more frustrated with Lindsey Buckingham insisting on making the most artsy version of Fleetwood Mac that he could.
Although the band ended up having mixed feelings about her going solo, it would have been a crime had she not been able to release Bella Donna. For as great as tunes like ‘Leather and Lace’ and ‘After the Glitter Fades’ were in their most raw form, there’s no way that they could have shared space on a Fleetwood Mac album. This was her stepping out and becoming a legend in her own right, but there’s always more to a career than a bunch of good singles.
Yes, ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ was a phenomenal piece of work, but since she had one of her biggest hits donated to her by Tom Petty in ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, Nicks had reservations about how she was perceived. Her biggest hit at the time wasn’t even written by her, so if she got a second chance at the big time, she was going to make sure she made the most authentic version of herself as she could.
And while The Wild Heart does have the same level of quality as Bella Donna, it’s clear that we’re listening to a much more seasoned version of her. ‘Stand Back’ had much more grit behind it, and even when she duets with Petty on the song ‘I Will Run To You’, there’s no doubting that she has total control over the sound she wants to get.
She had all the accolades that she wanted on her first album, but she knew that The Wild Heart was the moment she truly broke through, saying, “Bella Donna kicked off my solo career, but as I walked away from The Wild Heart, everybody knew that I had arrived as a solo artist. I was not going to just say, ‘That was fun’ and go back to Fleetwood Mac. I was going to be able to handle being in both bands.”
That didn’t mean the balance was going to be all that easy, though. Once she started filling massive venues on her own, the rest of Fleetwood Mac remember her being more unreliable behind the scenes, to the point where she was only in the studio for a few weeks at a time when making Tango in the Night, which led to her infamous fight with Buckingham before they could tour the record.
But for all of the headaches that came with scheduling, Nicks is one of the few artists who was able to balance both her careers at the same time. Because in a world where most people end up being tied to one project, the world told Nicks they were more than happy to hear her in whatever band she wanted to be in.
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