(Credits: Jimmy Kimmel Live)
Thu 7 August 2025 20:45, UK
For Stevie Nicks, some songs can often feel like old friends.
They were born from a moment in time, but when they actually make their way onto the tape, they are set in stone forever as a snapshot of the person she was back then. Sometimes it’s hard to go back, but there are always a handful that feel like melodic companions over the years.
That doesn’t mean that every single song is a cakewalk to go through. Nicks has gone on record saying that she isn’t a big fan of the kind of music she was making on the album Street Angel, and while Rumours is a fantastic record, there was no way that she was going to have warm feelings towards some of Lindsey Buckingham’s slights towards her throughout the record. But some of that resentment towards Fleetwood Mac was also her wanting to break free from the band.
It’s nice to be able to share the blame amongst a bunch of musicians, but after a while, anyone can find themselves shackled to the rest of their band against their will. And when Tusk came out and only featured a handful of Nicks’s greatest tunes, she knew that she needed to break free to get some of her tunes heard. It was definitely a risk, but Bella Donna set everything in motion for her solo career.
While Nicks herself said that she didn’t aim for the massive solo career that she ultimately got, she was going to run with it while she could. She never wanted to repeat herself by any stretch, but The Wild Heart feels like the perfect companion piece to her debut, including another brilliant Tom Petty song, ‘I Will Run To You’ and managing to get a bit more energy into her songs on tracks like ‘Stand Back’.
Even though many people like to read into her songs and think the title track has something to do with Buckingham, this kind of breakup is open enough to be about nearly anything. Not everyone may have had their heart broken like this, but they can easily picture a time when someone they loved chipped away at their heart so much that it began to turn to stone after a while.
And despite being proud of everything she had her hands on, she felt that ‘The Wild Heart’ was the most reliable song to her, saying, “It’s just intense, there are some wild words in it that just sort of popped up. I think that people are gonna love ‘Wild Heart’…it’s the one song that I go back to time and time again and listen to. There’s something about the vocal that just gives me shivers, because it’s just so real.”
In fact, that intensity even has some connective tissue to one of Nicks’s all-time greatest songs, ‘Silver Springs’. While that track was all about wishing that the memory of her haunts her other half every day of their lives, this is almost a defence for her being so unpredictable, always wanting to fight for her love but knowing the kind of terror on the horizon if she ever gets too close to anyone.
There’s a lot to unpack on the kind of person Nicks is on this track, but even if that heart is wild, you can’t fault someone for approaching every situation with her heart first. She knew that life could get unpredictable if she acted on that kind of impulse, but that’s what made everything a little bit more fun.
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