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Getting the right writing partner was never going to come easy for someone like Stevie Nicks.
Her entire personality revolved around having the right people around her to translate the songs that she heard in her head, and when she was flying solo for the first time, she wasn’t going to settle for anything less than perfection when she walked away from Fleetwood Mac. She needed to make sure that her songs were in good hands, and that meant finding someone who understood her words just as well as she did.
But it’s not like ‘The Mac’ were all that receptive to everything that Nicks was working on. Lindsey Buckingham brought a lot of great hooks to a lot of Nicks’s songs, but there was no reason for her to watch so many of her songs get cut from albums. She had too many ideas to watch them fall by the wayside, and getting someone like Tom Petty in the studio with her was the greatest blessing she could have asked for.
She had already wanted to run away from her old band to become an honorary Heartbreaker, but aside from Petty’s contributions to her records, people like Waddy Wachtel had the perfect idea in mind for what her songs needed. The music was meant to colour the lyrics perfectly whenever she told her stories, and whether it was those chugging notes in ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ or that lonesome guitar on ‘Bella Donna’, the music was what had to move her half the time.
Nicks could have easily started working with even greater musical giants when working on The Wild Heart, but there was something about Sandy Stewart that spoke to her in a way that no one else did. Her music wasn’t all that dissimilar to what Nicks was trying out, and when she sang tunes like ‘If Anyone Falls’, Nicks realised that she was looking at someone who was her musical kindred spirit.
Half of the session musicians could have done whatever they wanted, but Stewart was the one who seemed to be pushing Nicks in the direction that made the most sense, saying, “I’ve probably prayed for so many years that I’d find somebody I could write songs with, and I finally found her. She lives in Houston, and she’s totally crazy. She’s a real brilliant musician, and what she does for me is she writes a song, goes in with a band and records it, sends me the track, track sounds great.”
But the music isn’t going to matter unless Nicks has the right kind of story to tell, and a lot of her best moments on The Wild Heart come from Stewart having that perfect trade-off with her. No one would have felt that Nicks needed to completely restructure her sound by any means, but since Stewart could play synthesisers, this was almost a testing ground for when ‘The Mac’ would end up using 1980s instruments during their later albums like Mirage.
Further reading: From The Vault
And it’s not like Nicks ever forgot about what Stewart brought to the table, either. She was known for stockpiling as many songs as she could, and even years after working with her the first time, ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ dug out the song ‘Too Far From Texas’ when working on the comeback album Trouble in Shangri-La.
So while Stewart might not have been the kind of epic collaboration that you would have seen out of someone like Petty at the time, Nicks wasn’t looking for someone with the most star power whenever she made a record. She liked the idea of having someone that she could relate to, and as long as Stewart was counting something in, she knew that she was dealing with a song she could be proud of.
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