(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 2 July 2025 18:30, UK
When Stevie Nicks went solo, she had to learn the hard way what it meant for her career to plateau. While she’d likely pin this down to a subset of things (her changing appearance, addiction, and other personal hurdles), a big factor was establishing an identity outside the one that had made her, and growing into a separate role that wasn’t always going to be filled with the same explosive highs.
It’s something most of us know all too well, but something you can only really speak to once you’re on the other side. It’s easy to forget how much life is all about those moments when you feel you’re stuck with nothing figured out, but those moments are also the necessary stagnation needed to reach the other side. Granted, for Nicks, all of this felt a lot more intense than simple frustration, but the premise remains the same, and walking through quicksand in this case came in the form of her first solo record, Bella Donna.
It’s actually fairly complex to imagine a time when this record wasn’t as cherished as it is today, but then again, that speaks more to the legacy of female musicians in rock and how their path to legacy acts always seems somewhat belated when compared to their male counterparts. Nicks actually went through a really tough time navigating who she was outside of Fleetwood Mac when she began working on new material, and a lot of it came from the cesspit of expectation in a deeply flawed industry.
“After being a rock and roll sex symbol for all that time, and then all of a sudden to be this fat girl was so unacceptable to me,” she once said, which obviously seems pretty abhorrent to think about now, but it was the truth she faced back when she realised she was going through the one thing almost every female musician goes through when they start to show the first signs of growing out of the well-established appearance they’d held for such a long time.
With Bella Donna, Nicks also had to re-learn what she had to offer outside of Fleetwood Mac, which presented a hurdle she probably wasn’t ready for, even though she’d long established her footing within the group as someone whose affinity for poetic and whimsical lyricism came second to none, not even Lindsey Buckingham. “Bella Donna was really intense. But it was really fun, of course,” Nicks later reflected to Joe Benson on Off The Record, calling it the “definitive, unproven, white winged dove” in her discography.
She added: “Who knows- could’ve crashed right into the side of a mountain- nobody really knew. And nobody was very excited about me doing anything outside of Fleetwood Mac. Everybody was really pensive about it. I was really, like-um, dedicated, you know, and scared to make this record be a success. And like with every record that you do, when you first do it, even after it first comes out, you know you have to wait till you release your next record for anybody to rave about that record.”
She also went into how it only gained recognition after the release of The Wild Heart, which brought about renewed interest in her debut because it introduced a new Nicks that didn’t seem to be so much bogged down in the ins and outs of solo artistry as someone who looked to collaborate with others to bring in a renewed sense of excitement. Outside of Fleetwood Mac, Nicks had to go through the difficulty of pouring her soul into her first record, getting little back, before learning how true resilience forms when people come back far later, through the doors of something a little more gripping and intentional.
In other words, though we see it as a more accomplished effort now, those songs were something of a warm-up act, of Nicks floating through the hazy abyss that was her post-Mac career, working with others in a tentative way to re-discover what it meant to enter a new level of maturity. Then, The Wild Heart flourished, placing her at the forefront of where she’d always wanted to be.
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