(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Public Domain)
Mon 19 January 2026 19:30, UK
By the early 1980s, both Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks were perched on the chart pedestals of easy pop appeal, married with a rootsy anchorage pleasing fans of the emerging classic rock.
It was an impressive feat. While Petty’s Heartbreakers band loosely orbited the new wave with a similar power pop as The Cars or Blondie, Petty and Nicks owed nothing to punk or its resulting second British invasion.
The pair still dominated MTV as much as Billy Idol or Duran Duran, however. Both gaining parallel fame in the mid to late 1970s, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers dropped in 1976 while Nicks was on the cusp of global conquest with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on the horizon, equally closing the decade respectively with some of their biggest hits from Tango in the Night to ‘Free Fallin’’.
Yet, in the aftermath of Rumours‘ blockbuster success, Nicks had fantasised about leaving her Fleetwood Mac juggernaut to join the Heartbreakers, approaching the band around 1978 with her proposition. While politely declining the offer, Nicks instead pressed for an original song from the Heartbreakers leader.
“I knew Stevie, but not real well,” Petty confessed to Musician in 1981. “She’d been asking me for a long time for a song. I thought that ‘Insider’ would be the thing for her because it’s acoustic. It has that kind of feel. So, we went to do the vocal, and she started to sing harmony every time. When it was over, I just sat there in awe. She walked back in and said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘It’s amazing.’”
However, Nicks knew Petty perhaps was a little jealous of such a prized cut. “She said, ‘I can tell by the look on your face, you don’t wanna give me this song. I’m giving it back to you right now.’ I really thought a lot of her for that.”
In light of such creative generosity, Petty felt a song trade was in order. It turned out that Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell was working on a lick inspired by The Rolling Stones, packed with skulking energy and a stolid backbeat groove. Nicks dug it, having heard the demo after some negotiations with the pair’s producer Jimmy Iovine, who was working on both Hard Promises and Bella Donna respectively across 1980-’81.
“Wow!” Nicks reportedly exclaimed. “That’s why I wanted you to write me a song. It’s rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what you do. ‘Insider’ sounds like what I do.” Petty agreed, in retrospect, astonished by his own creative blind spot, “I thought, ‘How dumb of me, to think that she’d want me to write like her.’”
Nicks got what she wanted: a momentary de facto membership of The Heartbreakers she’d previously pined for, everybody from the band involved in cutting Bella Donna’s lead single ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’. It would prove a smash, peaking at number three on the Hot 100 and helping push Nicks’ solo debut to the very top of the US albums chart in September 1981.
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