In her absence, Fleetwood Mac weren\u2019t doing too good either. Their 1995 album Time was a disaster, a commercial flop that would later be ranked by music writer Colin Larkin at No 10 in his list of the All-Time Worst Albums Ever Made.<\/p>\n
Latest Videos From![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.musicradar.com\/media\/img\/musicradar_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\n
You may like<\/p>\n
But while Nicks was plotting her return to the band, she was also attempting to write songs for a solo album. And in that respect she was failing \u2013 until a conversation over dinner with her favourite fellow rock star put her back on track.<\/p>\n
Tom Petty had been a close friend of hers since the late \u201970s, and the success of her debut solo album Bella Donna in 1981 was driven by the single Stop Draggin\u2019 My Heart Around, a duet by Nicks with Petty and his band The Heartbreakers, written by Petty and lead guitarist Mike Campbell.<\/p>\n
In a interview with Q magazine in 2001, to promote her solo album Trouble In Shangri-La, Nicks revealed how the impetus for that album came from a pep talk from Petty.<\/p>\n
She recalled: \u201cIn 1995 I had dinner with Tom and I was complaining a lot \u2013 because Epstein-Barr makes you so tired, you don\u2019t have a lot of get up and go.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, Tom is a good friend of mine. We\u2019re close like a brother and sister, so he can say stuff to me that nobody else really can. And when he says something to me I know he means it and I know he\u2019s looking out for me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018Will you help me get started on this? Will you help me write some songs?\u2019 And he got really angry with me. He said I wasn\u2019t appreciating all that I\u2019d done and how hard I\u2019d worked all these years.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Yeah, you\u2019ve had a couple of bad years, but it\u2019s okay. You need to go home and go on a mission \u2013 reinvent yourself, write some new songs. You\u2019re one of the best songwriters I know. You don\u2019t need my help. You don\u2019t need anybody\u2019s help!\u2019<\/p>\n
What to read next<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I did it. I followed that advice. I went home that night and said to everybody: \u2018This is it \u2013 I\u2019m starting a new record.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact that it took all of six years for that record to be released was due to Nicks reuniting with Fleetwood Mac in 1997.<\/p>\n
This saw the return of the band\u2019s most successful line-up, as featured on multi-million selling albums such as Rumours and Tango In The Night \u2013 with Nicks alongside drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboard player and lead vocalist Christine McVie, and guitarist and lead vocalist Lindsey Buckingham.<\/p>\n
The band\u2019s comeback show at Warner Studios in Burbank, California was recorded for a live album, The Dance, released on 19 August 1997.<\/p>\n
When Nicks spoke to Q for the release of Trouble In Shangri-La, she also discussed other famous friends, including Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love, Prince and one of her ex-partners, Don Henley.<\/p>\n
Sheryl Crow was a key collaborator on Trouble In Shangri-La, after she and Nicks had worked together on songs for the soundtrack to the 1998 movie Practical Magic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first time I really met Sheryl was at a Don Henley benefit dinner,\u201d Nicks said. \u201cI said I would really love it if she could do some production on this record.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got a call about doing a song for the Practical Magic movie, I really didn\u2019t want to do it, but Sheryl said that she would produce, and that\u2019s when our relationship was really cemented.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s like Tom Petty. She\u2019s the second person in my life who\u2019s a rock star who I am becoming very good friends with. I can\u2019t pull anything with Sheryl, nor her with me. It\u2019s a very grounding thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I can give her advice because I\u2019ve already gone through everything she could possibly think of going through. I try to save her from as much as I can. She\u2019s become like a beloved little sister.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicks said that she and Courtney Love became acquainted around the time that Love\u2019s band Hole recorded the 1998 album Celebrity Skin.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe sent the record to me before it came out,\u201d Nicks said, \u201cand I was like, \u2018Oh my God, what if I don\u2019t like it?\u2019 What are you going to tell your friend? But I was very pleasantly surprised. The songs were really well crafted. I was surprised.\u201d<\/p>\n
She admitted, however, that she and Love had not stayed in contact.<\/p>\n
\u201cCourtney and I would be friends if we spent time together,\u201d she said, \u201cbut when the Fleetwood Mac thing happened again my whole life was sucked away and I had no time to do anything. I didn\u2019t see her for a while, and what happens is you drift. If you don\u2019t work on your friendships, they drift away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicks fondly reminisced about her brief love affair with Don Henley, whom she dated in 1976, when she was enjoying her first taste of stardom with Fleetwood Mac and he was working on the Eagles\u2019 most famous album. The pair later performed a duet on the ballad Leather And Lace from her Bella Donna album.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was with Don he was right at the end of the recording of Hotel California,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd you know, the Eagles really taught Fleetwood Mac how to spend money. We had them to emulate.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne time Don sent a little cranberry-red Learjet to pick me up somewhere and fly me to New York from a Fleetwood Mac gig. It waited on the ground for me to fly back the next day so I could make my gig. That was one of the first things that had me thinking, \u2018Being a rock star really is wild!\u2019 That was in 1976. A year before I was waiting on tables.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy relationship was Don was really nice but it didn\u2019t last because we were both really famous rock stars. It was too hard. But we really did care about each other and we still do. Today, I consider Don one of my closest friends. So it lasted.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the Q interview, Nicks also made an amusing observation about Prince.<\/p>\n
In 1983, they had worked together on her song Stand Back, which had been inspired by his earlier hit Little Red Corvette.<\/p>\n
Prince played synthesisers on Nicks\u2019s song, but was never officially credited for his contribution.<\/p>\n
Nicks told Q of a disagreement they\u2019d had.<\/p>\n
As she recalled it: \u201cPrince is overtly sexual. I am very quietly sexual. That\u2019s the difference. Prince wants to be outrageous and flamboyant, always.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told him, \u2018I do write about sex \u2013 you\u2019re just not hearing it because you\u2019re looking for this overt thing \u2013 and that\u2019s not what I\u2019m about.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stevie Nicks is one of the most successful and acclaimed singers and songwriters of all time \u2013 but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-457193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}