Any other vocalist of his stature could become the biggest diva and claim that they needed everything to be perfect when they so much as set foot on the stage, but sometimes the best singers are the ones who realise that it’s just a job like anyone else and do the best they can to make everything sound perfect. Nicks didn’t ever want to forget where she came from, and that applied even to when things didn’t go her way whenever she worked on one of those classic Fleetwood Mac albums.
Any band with that many iconic songwriters is going to need to know the meaning of compromise at some point, and Nicks was the first person to claim that she suffered for her art more than a few times. It was bad enough having to deal with the fallout of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, but aside from yelling at each other in between takes of all their classic songs, knowing that the world would never get to hear a song like ‘Silver Springs’ the way they should have would have been enough for anyone else to want to quit the band in protest.
Nicks didn’t want to feel like she was being taken for granted, and after one too many times of having to work out everyone else’s songs, Bella Donna was her chance to show people what she really had to offer. She needed to call her own shots after a while, but when looking through a lot of her material, she had to end up eating a fair bit of humble pie when Tom Petty showed up to help flesh out a song like ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’.
She already wanted a song that sounded like Petty anyway, so getting the chance to work with him was already a dream come true, but it does get a little bit complicated when you’re working on your own statement, and one of the songs is something you didn’t even get to write. Nicks figured that all that mattered was finding songwriters that she could identify with, and for a brief moment in time, Dave Stewart seemed to be the Lennon to her McCartney whenever they started playing.
He was responsible for her getting off her ass and making a new album at the start of the 2010s, and while she is forever grateful for him helping her rediscover herself, things didn’t go swimmingly when they first met. Both of them were huge fans of each other, but getting the chance to sing the song ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ was the kind of chance that slipped through Nicks’s fingers the minute that Petty realised that he could turn it into something beautiful.
Petty had already been cheated out of making the song ‘Boys of Summer’ when he first rejected, so he wasn’t going to make that mistake again, with Nicks recalling, “[Me and Stewart] met a long time ago. He sent me his song ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ but it ended up being Tom Petty’s. I missed my chance with that song and I was furious but I understood that it was destiny.”
Besides, sometimes getting the rejection of one song could be all the motivation you need to make something on your own. And given where Nicks would go on records like The Other Side of the Mirror, she rediscovered another side of herself when she started working with even better songwriters, despite her involuntarily stealing the riff for Petty’s ‘Runaway Trains’ for one of her own tunes.
The whole thing may have been a strange game of songwriting musical chairs, but Nicks was never out to maliciously get back at Petty by any stretch. She only wanted to make music that people could relate to, and sometimes the right backing track can be the inspiration that she needed to turn a typical chord progression into one of the most mystical rock and roll tunes ever written.