Credit: Far Out / Stevie Nicks
Wed 7 October 2026 21:30, UK
Stevie Nicks made it her whole life’s mission to put some of her best experiences into her songs.
Although anyone would probably expect a tell-all book from her at this stage of her career, there’s really no point in her making one these days, since a lot of the greatest emotional moments of her life are out there for the world to listen to half the time. There aren’t many people who don’t already know the volatility that she had in Fleetwood Mac, but not everything that she made needed to be dictated by what her bandmates wanted her to deal with every time she sang.
Because by now, Nicks is probably more of a leader of ‘The Mac’ than Mick Fleetwood was half the time. She wasn’t outwardly trying to be one of the biggest dictators of the band or anything like that, but when you have tunes like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Sara’ under your belt, you’re bound to have more than a few ideas for how every one of those songs is supposed to be delivered in a live setting.
Which is why she started to have a lot more problems with Lindsey Buckingham as the years went on. Their relationship was always bound to have its ups and downs throughout their career, but what Nicks was doing had a lot more to do with getting her voice heard. She wasn’t making music just because she wanted fame and attention, so when her songs ended up getting left on the cutting room floor, it’s not like she was all that psyched about it whenever she had to sing tunes like ‘Go Your Own Way’.
It was bad enough that she was being silenced, but she didn’t want to feel like she was being talked over by Buckingham all the time. She had already had to grit her teeth through ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ when she found out that ‘Silver Springs’ wasn’t going to make it onto Rumours, but when she started to feel stifled again during Tusk, she knew that she needed a more constructive outlet for herself than just being the member of the band that sang most of the ballads.
She had a lot more to offer, and when she first floated the idea of going solo, she was already a little bit scared. The last thing that she wanted to do was break up Fleetwood Mac, but by the time that she released Bella Donna, she had finally found a proper place to put a lot of her songs. She didn’t need to be tied down by what everyone else thought anymore, and a lot of the tunes that wound up on the record had been floating around Mac rehearsals for months on end before she gave them a home.
In her mind, these songs were always going to be hers, and if the rest of her bandmates didn’t see the magic in them, she was going to give them a refuge on a proper record, saying, “When I came off the road with Fleetwood Mac, I really had decided that it was time for me to make some decisions and some changes in my life, one of them being that I wanted to make sure I could still exist alone without Fleetwood Mac.”
“It was telling myself to come in out of the darkness, and also offering the same question to everybody else. And it was a decision whether or not to remain in the darkness or not.”
Stevie Nicks
Further reading: From The Vault
And while Nicks would always have a home in Fleetwood Mac, there are some songs on here that the rest of the band could have never pulled off.
‘Kind of Woman’ has the kind of sullen mood that no one else could make, and ‘Think About It’ was a tune that was so catchy it’s a wonder what the band didn’t see in it when they first played during the Rumours sessions.
Taking a risk like this was always going to be scary, but the fact that Nicks made out with over four million records by the end of things really shows you how committed she was to pushing this over the line. Her entire career had been spent tethered to her old band, but even when flying free, she was out there to show everyone that her songs meant a lot more than a few catchy melodies.
