(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 9 December 2025 16:00, UK
There’s a good chance that any other singer, like Stevie Nicks, would get tired of telling the same stories over and over again.
It’s bad enough to relive one piece of your past every single time people talk about your masterpieces, but if the heaviness and drama of Rumours is added on top of everything, it probably doesn’t get any easier talking about songs like ‘Go Your Own Way’ when you know what the track is about. But even if there are ugly portions in the background, the good times have far outweighed the bad every single time Nicks gets up on that stage.
Then again, her solo career was the best decision she could have possibly made once Tusk was finished. ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ was never going to be the person to break up Fleetwood Mac, but she could, at the very least, find a way to separate herself from the others so that she wouldn’t have her songs changed when Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie started working on them.
And when Bella Donna exploded, Nicks was convinced that she had made the best record of her career. She was finally free to be herself, but being a solo star offered up a whole new problem. There was already tension between her and Buckingham after the breakup, but imagine what the rehearsal room was like after she walked in, with songs like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ having been one of the biggest hits of the early 1980s.
But that doesn’t mean that her solo career was all sunshine and roses, either. There were plenty of moments where her drug habits had become too much for her, and when looking back on songs like ‘Talk to Me’, Nicks even admitted that she couldn’t help but ridicule herself in the music video for it because of how out of it she appeared to be onscreen. But that paled in comparison to what she sounded like in the studio.
Even though there were many dustups in the studio when Buckingham was at the helm, Nicks was still interested in letting inspiration come to her when working in the studio. All she had was the basic demo for ‘Talk To Me’, but when she had the right audience in front of her, when Jim Keltner showed up, she remembered giving the kind of performance that she would have never had on her own.
Keltner was practically there for emotional support, but having that one person in the studio took her back to the moment she was behind the glass, saying, “Jim Keltner came in to do some drum overdubs, and then he stayed to be an audience to push me a little, to make me get a great vocal. So I had someone to sing to, and I got the vocal. I put some tambourine on it, and it was finished forevermore. That was one of my unforgettable moments.”
Granted, it’s nice to see that one of Nicks’s greatest memories from around this time was actually happy. A lot of the greatest Fleetwood Mac songs were made when all of them were screaming at each other in the studio, but after meeting friends like Tom Petty and Keltner along the way, being a rock and roll star didn’t necessarily mean having to suffer for her art every single time she performed.
All of the greatest songs of all time came from strong emotions, and if heartache was the perfect fuel for her to create tunes like ‘Silver Springs’ and ‘Dreams’, why couldn’t having the right friends give her the same result? She may have been flying solo for a while at this point, but even when she didn’t have to be shackled to the rest of ‘The Mac’, the fact that ‘Talk to Me’ ended up like that was a testament to having good friends in the industry.
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