(Credits: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher)
Sun 23 November 2025 17:00, UK
For Stevie Nicks, being able to write with someone else was about more than a working relationship.
Although she had seen Lindsey Buckingham as a musical soulmate in lots of ways, there are hardly any fond memories that she has from the era where they were constantly making personal digs at each other whenever they began working on Rumours. That kind of toxicity would have made anyone want to go solo, but nothing that Nicks did was going to come together without a little help from her friends as well.
Granted, it’s not like much needs to be added to some of her greatest tunes. Even if she was playing ‘Dreams’ on a piano by herself with minimal chords, there’s nothing that really needs to be added to the track to turn it into a classic, even if Buckingham’s guitar lines are a nice touch. And even when working on Bella Donna, a lot of the hooks behind the tracks are hearing Nicks’s voice soar over everything.
There might be the occasional song from Tom Petty or duetting with Don Henley on her early tunes, but it was always important for Nicks to remain authentic. She nearly even took ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ off her record because she wanted it to be her definitive statement, but when listening to the record as a whole, it’s not like a song like ‘Kind of Woman’ and ‘Edge of Seventeen’ couldn’t hold their own next to Petty’s gifted song, or even many Fleetwood Mac songs for that matter.
But even when she was at her lowest, Nicks was always going to be left to write tunes by herself. Despite Street Angel nearly killing her due to her reliance on Klonopin, one of the best lessons she ever got was Petty reminding her that she was capable of making great songs. She needed reassurance that she was still Stevie Nicks, but that’s not to say that she couldn’t write with some friends along the way.
Albums like Trouble in Shangri-La helped her find her footing again, but when she started working on new music a decade later, she had a godsend in Dave Stewart. While he might not have been known by many outside of being the dude with the beard in Eurythmics, Nicks found another musical soulmate when she found that he could practically finish her musical thoughts whenever they started playing.
Compared to everyone else she had worked with, Nicks felt that there was a specific energy with Stewart that no one else had, saying, “I always wished that I could write with people. I do write, in a way, with Mike Campbell [a sideman for Tom Petty], who sends me tracks. But he’s not there. So when the thing with Dave happened it was so out of the blue. We wrote seven songs in under three months, and recorded as we went, and my whole idea of songwriting changed. Dave Stewart doesn’t have an ego. He can read your mind.”
It’s not like Stewart was any stranger to the medium, either. He had always tried using whatever new tools he had at his disposal, and given how he had written classics with Petty before and even hosted the Traveling Wilburys at his house when he was out of town was more than enough to put him into legendary status as a songwriter.
But judging by how Nicks described him, it wasn’t strictly about making the most extravagant piece of musical brilliance whenever Stewart showed up. He knew that his job was to get pieces of human emotion down on tape, and that always came from getting the right singer to perform what they have in their heart.
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