Tonight’s selections from Stevie Nicks’ first solo album, 1981’s Bella Donna. An artist whose work is outside of my usual listening that is enjoying a moment with me. Or I’m enjoying a moment with her work; whatever.
Bella Donna
Bella Donna, Stevie Nicks’ debut solo album, was released on July 27, 1981, but most of its songs were written years before. In Fleetwood Mac, nearly everyone was a songwriter, and their albums had only so much space. Releasing a solo album became a necessity for Nicks, who had an overabundance of songs that didn't fit on band records, as well as a chance to explore her creativity outside of the group.
Nicks began recording the album in the late ‘70s, between sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Following 1977’s Rumours, they were the biggest band in the world. For Nicks, however, the group had become a gilded cage. She’d split with bandmate and musical collaborator Lindsey Buckingham, and what she felt were her best songs were relegated to B-sides or discarded altogether. Fleetwood Mac were also in tumult, having finished the epic recording and touring behind a double album that pushed them to their limits, only to be greeted with mixed reviews. For the sensitive Nicks, the band was becoming a thing she lost herself in rather than something she was part of.
So she struck a deal with Fleetwood Mac to record a solo album using the songs they didn’t want. Sessions for Bella Donna started between the sessions for Tusk, with Nicks recording demos that wouldn’t see release for more than two years. When the tour in support of the album ended, Nicks went into the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine to begin work on her own record. — Ultimate Classic Rock
Stop Draggin' My Heart Around (w/ Tom Petty)
With some songs in tow, Nicks requested Jimmy Iovine to produce what would become her first solo effort based on his work with Tom Petty. Iovine and Nicks became a couple. Iovine hand-picked musicians for the project, including Roy Bittan from Bruce’ Springsteen’s E Street Band, Benmont Tench, Stan Lynch, and Mike Campbell from the Heartbreakers, Don Henley and Don Felder from Eagles, Waddy Wachtel and Russ Kunkel from Linda Ronstadt’s band, Davey Johnstone from Elton John’s band, and Billy Payne of Little Feat. And with background vocalists Sharon Celani and Lori Petty, the supergroup of sorts began recording.
Bella Donna yielded four singles and three monster hits: lead single, the Tom Petty-penned “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” the Don Henley duet “Leather and Lace,” and Nicks’ signature solo piece, “Edge of Seventeen.” The fourth single, “After the Glitter Fades,” didn’t fare as well on the charts, but might be the most exciting of the bunch to revisit all these years later. — Under the Radar
Edge of Seventeen
If [Patti] Smith is obliged to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—and the punk scene that included the Ramones, Television, and Suicide—Nicks’s debt is to Laurel Canyon, and to the sentimental, silky-voiced artists who emerged from L.A. in the late sixties and early seventies. Some of those acts—James Taylor, the Eagles—are now considered, fairly or not, irrelevant to the Zeitgeist: too mellow, too affluent, too sexless, too white. Candles and incense and macramé plant hangers; wistful thoughts about weather. Nicks’s lyrics often worry over domestic or earthly concerns—gardens, mountains, flowers, the seasons—and how they might affect the whims of her heart. “It makes no difference at all / ’Cause I wear boots all summer long,” she sings in “Nightbird.” When compared with the dissonant and provocative music coming out of downtown New York, the California sound could seem limp. But the scene in Laurel Canyon was tumultuous. Many of its artists—including, at various times, Nicks—were wrecked by drug addiction. Nicks’s voice, a strange, quivering contralto, gives her songs unexpected weight. Its tone reminds me of the gloaming—that lambent, transitional moment between night and day.
“Bella Donna” was produced by Jimmy Iovine, a Brooklyn-born audio engineer who worked on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and produced the Patti Smith Group’s “Easter” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Damn the Torpedoes.” Iovine spent time in California, but his sensibility was tougher and more plainly that of the East Coast. He later became a co-founder of Interscope Records, where he helped to establish the career of the rapper Tupac Shakur, and, for a period, he oversaw the hip-hop label Death Row Records. Iovine was aware of concerns that Nicks was too coddled and immature to make a solo record as good as the records she’d made with Fleetwood Mac. Regardless, there was romantic chemistry. “This record was our love story unfolding,” she has said. — The New Yorker
Leather and Lace
I’m not saying, “be like us” and “we’re perfect role models,” because we’re not, but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions. I mean we have articles called: “On taking yourself seriously. How to not care what people think of you.” But we also have articles like – Oops, nope, erm um… I’m figuring it out! Ha-ha! If you use that, you can get away with anything. We also have articles called: “How to look like you weren’t just crying in less than five minutes.”
So, all of that being said I still really appreciate those characters and movies and articles, like that on our site that are just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self esteem and your flaws, and how you accept those.
So what I want you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this is to just be Stevie Nicks. Like, that’s all you have to do, because my favorite thing about her, other than like everything, is that she has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws, and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them. And yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks.
Thank you.
Tavi Gevinson TEDx Talk
After the Glitter Fades
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: John Mulaney, Gary Clark Jr., Stevie Wonder
Jimmy Fallon: Kate Hudson, Chrissy Teigen, John Legend
Stephen Colbert: John Leguizamo, Laura Coates
After Midnight: Phoebe Robinson, Dewayne Perkins, Guy Branum (R 3/27/24)
Seth Meyers: Adam Pally, Queen Cora Coleman
Watch What Happens Live: Danielle Olivera, Andrea Canning
The Daily Show: Pre-empted
LAST WEEK'S POLL: FAVORITE SCHWARZENEGGER MOVIE?
Conan the Barbarian 0%
Last Action Hero 9%
Predator 18%
The Terminator 9%
Total Recall 9%
True Lies 18%
Other 36%
π 0%
