Trivia / Stevie Nicks

• Breakthrough Hit: Bella Donna established Nicks as a solo artist in her own right after coming to fame as a member of Fleetwood Mac.
• Career Resurrection: Had one for her solo career that dovetailed with Fleetwood Mac's after losing weight and kicking her drug addictions.
• Chart Displacement: She had four Top 10 hits on the Hot 100, yet "Edge of Seventeen" fell short at #11.
• Creator Breakdown: Much of The Wild Heart was Nicks working through her grief over the death of her close friend Robin Anderson.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The first album she ever released, Buckingham Nicks (along with then-significant other Lindsey Buckingham), has never yet been officially released on CD or other digital format in the U.S. Both Nicks and Buckingham very much want to see this happen, but the project has been stuck in Development Hell for decades in part due to the difficulty of finding good-enough masters.
• What Could Have Been:
  • During a particularly tough patch in 1973-74, according to Stevie in her 1981 Rolling Stone interview, her father (who, be it noted, was overall always deeply supportive of her career choice) came to her and suggested that it might be sensible to place a time limit on her attempts to make it in the music world if she didn't start seeing some success. As this was the period during which Stevie was forced to take all sorts of odd jobs (dental hygienist?!) to put food on hers and Lindsey's table, she took that suggestion seriously and contemplated going back to college. She had been majoring in speech communication at San Jose State with the intention of becoming a speech therapist/pathologist.
  • Double Standard: Lindsey refused to work, devoting full time to composing, practicing and auditioning. He felt if he took a job, he would be a "whore". He didn't mind her waiting tables at Frisch's Big Boy, he just didn't want to do it himself.^note Stevie was very patient about this, knowing that he had strange "spells", which turned out to be epilepsy.
  • The song "Sara" from Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, which Nicks wrote, was about good friend Sara Recor. But Don Henley claims it was written about their unborn child, which Nicks had aborted. While Nicks denies this, she did say in 1979 that if she did keep the baby and married Henley, and the baby was a girl, she would've named her Sara after her friend.
  • Stevie originally wrote "Leather and Lace" for Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, but their marriage was starting to break up.
  • Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin originally wrote the song "Love Will Find A Way" for Stevie to sing, before Atco Records, to whom Nicks and Yes were signed at the time, intervened, seeing it as a potential single for Yes. It was released as the lead single for their 1987 Big Generator album instead.

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