(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 16 October 2025 9:00, UK
It’s not easy for someone like Stevie Nicks to pull her magic out of thin air.
The best moments she ever had in the studio always came from when she was working amongst her friends, and when everyone found a way to be on the same musical wavelength every time they performed. Everyone might get stuck sometimes, but Nicks knew that she was never going to be pigeonholed as being the witch-like singer who danced next to her boyfriend every time she walked onstage.
But when talking about Nicks’s career, that also means taking into account which record she’s working on. As much as her work in Fleetwood Mac dwarfs pretty much everything that came afterwards, it’s not like her solo career is considered a footnote by any stretch. She had the best in the business working with her, and even if she was working on some of the least complicated tunes in the world, it took the right people to translate that kind of emotion onto the tape every single time they played.
Even if she was confident in getting her own songs out of her system, it was bound to be risky getting a record like Bella Donna off the ground. There’s no possible way that a record with involvement from Jimmy Iovine, Don Henley, and Tom Petty could possibly be considered poor by any means, but there was a lot of risk involved with Nicks taking this kind of jump. She had no support system among her former bandmates, but she was determined to get her songs out since they weren’t getting any love on their mainline records.
And it’s not like anything was subpar by any stretch. If you look at the title track, ‘After the Glitter Fades’, and the singles like ‘Edge of Seventeen’, you’d have to wonder what the hell the rest of the band was smoking to ignore some of those tunes. Nicks had a wellspring of great music in her arsenal, and it was bound to be a lot more interesting once she was able to play the tunes live.
Because, really, Nicks was born to play her music to any crow that she could. That ‘Rhiannon’-style demeanour didn’t simply go away when she lost the rest of Fleetwood Mac, but it wasn’t until listening to the reaction from the crowd on that first tour that she realised that she didn’t need to worry about matching up to her old band.
Her fans wanted her just the way she was, and it was enough to leave Nicks in tears on that final night, saying, “It’s a whole different can of beans to realize that if you’re not out there-if you have to run to the wings for some powder or to get your hair brushed or because you’re dripping wet-there is no one on-stage who’ll talk to the audience. But we had some truly spectacular moments, when the band and I were blown away at the response. At the last Los Angeles show, I must have looked like the bag lady of Bella Donna: I was bent over, because I had so many roses to carry. I was crying.”
And while any crowd would have gone wild if she pulled out a version of ‘Rhiannon’ or ‘Landslide’, this is one of the few instances where the new material would have been just as welcome. Not everyone can manage to blow people away with tunes that have only been released in a matter of months, but the version of Nicks that showed up for these shows was built a lot different than the one screaming in Fleetwood Mac.
She had been through the wringer and come out like a champion after Bella Donna came out, and even if she didn’t have her old mates with her, she had the potential to dominate the mainstream anyway. It may have stung Lindsey Buckingham to see his ex doing so well, but all that resentment was bound to fall on deaf ears compared to everyone singing along to ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’.
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