![]() ![]() Lyrically, it’s a mixed bag with some songs that mean something, others sounding like Nicks had sniffed fairy dust off a unicorn’s head (which knowing what the Mac got up to, she may have done). The Wild Heart was her second solo album and it’s not quite as interesting, though clearly the musicianship is excellent. This re-release comes with remastered tracks, a CD of outtakes and demos and a live 1981 Los Angeles gig, which is good. The songs are the mix of rock, pop and country you’re familiar with and it’s a good album, the songs staying the right side of chilled Californian vibe / bland radio-friendly porridge divide. “When you’re touring with a band you hardly meet anyone,” Nicks says. We read one review that said Nicks “called in her old friends” but, in the sleeve notes, she says she didn’t know how to contact any of them and it was Iovine who brought them together. He drafted in people like Don Henley, Tom Petty’s guitarist Mike Campbell, the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan, and Benmont Tench, a founder of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, whose piano playing was brought in to early rehearsals - all players with character. In the excellent sleeve notes he says that he didn’t want session players, because, while talented musicians, they brought no personality to recordings. She teamed up with producer Jimmy Iovine (in more ways than one, as they started an affair on day one, according to the sleeve notes) and Iovine called in his contacts to create the sound. The album contains 10 songs composed by Nicks while on tour with Mac, and Tom Petty’s Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around, one of the stand-outs and the first single. You know the sound, so you know what these two remastered CDs contain.īella Donna was her first solo release and is the better of these two, presumably because she had a batch of songs written over the years to draw on. She would recover somewhat with The Other Side of the Mirror - her voice sounds great on that record - and she had a few respectable songs on Behind the Mask, but it would take years to put the pieces back together.īy the time The Dance and Trouble and Shangri-La rolled around ,it was very moving and satisfying to have all of the Stevie's merged into one healthier, more powerful Stevie who had her life and priorities in order.Stevie Nicks is the bonkers but brilliant singer with Fleetwood Mac, whose ethereal, scratchy voice is famous. Her all-time low would come on Tango in the Night with the truly awful songs Welcome to the Room.Sara and When I See You Again. The beautiful, mystical Stevie of Rhiannon, the soulful, introspective Stevie of Landslide and the wise, broken-hearted Stevie of Dreams were increasingly replaced by a hard-bitten, drugged-out, braying SUPERSTAR on the skids. While I understand that some fans - particularly younger fans - love out-of-control, coked-out Stevie because she represents a hot mess of raw talent and because they know she would recover her footing, older fans like me find parts of The Wild Heart and Rock a Little rather alarming and sad. Her thoughts are scattered, the lyrics jump around and it all seems un-integrated and jittery. Lyrically, Stevie gave plenty of ammunition to detractors who said her songs were rambling and incoherent, and in too many places it feels as if her words spring from her own, insular drug-reality with little thought given to how they would land. The Rolling Stone review didn't help - the reviewer hyperbolically called the album a "catastrophe" - but there was a grain of truth there. ![]() It was particularly noteworthy that her duet with Tom Petty wasn't chosen as a single, had little impact and is largely forgotten - nowhere near as effective as Insider or Stop Draggin' My Heart Around. While the epic title song, featuring Stevie's most daring-ever vocal (check out the "wild, wild, wild, WIIIIILLLD HEART!" thriller at song's end), Sand Back, Sable on Blonde and Beauty and the Beast (another daring moment) showed Stevie at the top of her game, other songs (Gate and Garden, Nightbird, Nothing Ever Changes, If Anyone Falls) were comparative throwaways, indicating that there was a limit to how many worthwhile songs she could generate in a given space of time. Pushing her voice and her talent to the limit and fueled by ever-increasing amounts of cocaine, the album foreshadowed the frayed, burned-out and desperate Stevie of Rock a Little. While I appreciate The Wild Heart for its wildness and for some of its wonderful songs, this was the moment when Stevie began to unravel, although it wasn't necessarily apparent at the time.
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