(Credits: Far Out / Jim Summaria / Warner Bros. Records)
Sun 11 January 2026 16:30, UK
Unfairly or otherwise, Stevie Nicks has built up quite a reputation when it comes to the men she’s been in relationships with.
They are often marked by prominent features of fame, fortune, drama, and tumult: in short, if you’re just looking for someone to share a quiet life with, she is probably not the woman for you. But even despite her tendency for chasing the spotlight and everything that comes with it, this does not mean Nicks lacks a soft spot for the people she lets into her life.
You only have to look so far as her partnership with Lindsey Buckingham to see that there are some redeeming qualities, even if they’re hidden deep down. No one would have expected those two to build bridges after the decades of espionage, but the restoration works have still begun. The same can be said for Joe Walsh – their relationship may have been rocky, but it ultimately rests on a foundation of love.
Indeed, those years between the late 1970s and early ‘80s were ones that allowed Nicks to gain a perspective on life far beyond the drama, all thanks to her muse of the Eagles guitarist. He was, of course, playing the same rock and roll game that she was, but also having faced some of the deepest tragedies that one can endure, he knew that none of it really mattered.
This was something he was keen to impress on Nicks throughout their time together, especially since he was still grieving the loss of his young daughter Emma, who devastatingly died in a car accident in 1974. It left the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman not only reeling but realising where she had gone wrong. So, as a token of gratitude, she wrote him a song.
The result was the gut-wrenching ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’, a lament of love, loss, and shining a light on the ones being pummelled by grief while still carrying on. Released in 1985 on her album TimeSpace, the singer said of the song in the record’s liner notes: “I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows.”
Driving along one night, the couple passed a playground that Walsh used to take Emma to, where he told Nicks the only thing his daughter ever complained about was that she was too small to reach the water fountain. “I burst into tears saying, ‘You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn’t you?’. I was right, under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, ‘Dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink’,” Nicks explained.
In that moment, she didn’t see the rock star or the massive persona. She simply saw a man, weathered by heartache, doing his best to honour his child. It was this version of Walsh that the wider world so rarely saw, and the track reached into that human heart. “Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so many ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive,” Nicks rounded off.
We can be so absorbed by rock stars with all their whims and pretensions that it’s easy to see how they fall into the trap of playing up to it. Nicks cannot feign innocence to this, but equally, you cannot fault her for finding the real soul in people and turning it into song. Her relationship with Walsh may not ultimately have stood the test of time, but the lessons he taught her would undeniably stick forever.
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