Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks (b. May 26, 1948 in Phoenix, Arizona) has been the lead singer off-and-on for Fleetwood Mac for over three and a half decades (since New Year's Day, 1975). She has worked intermittently as a solo artist since 1981, having by far the most commercially successful solo career of any current or former Fleetwood Mac member, and also the most prolific, with seven albums (so far) of new material, two greatest-hits compilations, one box set (a mixture of greatest hits, B-sides, previously unreleased songs and demos) and one live album, as well as numerous videos.

Discography:

• Bella Donna (1981)
• The Wild Heart (1983)
• Rock A Little (1985)
• The Other Side of the Mirror (1989)
• Timespace (1991)
• Street Angel (1994)
• Enchanted (1998)
• Trouble in Shangri-La (2001)
• Crystal Visions (2007)
• The Soundstage Sessions: Live in Chicago (2009)
• In Your Dreams (2011)

Stevie Nicks provides examples of the following tropes:

• Cloudcuckoolander: In the early years of her career (both solo and with the Mac), she often came across as this. She's still very mystical but has become much more grounded in recent years.
• Eighties Hair: Most noticeable in the videos of "Talk To Me" and "I Can't Wait" (from Rock A Little) and the album cover of The Other Side of the Mirror.
• Epic Rocking: In her solo concerts, she customarily turns "Edge of Seventeen" and "Stand Back" into major set pieces, complete with long drum and guitar solos. The former song also tends to get stretched out because of her traditional edge-of-stage promenades to collect gifts (see Girls Love Stuffed Animals below).
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: It's an end-of-concert tradition for Stevie to pace up and down the edge of the stage, accepting gifts of all sorts from her fans. She's said to have amassed one of the, if not the, largest stuffed-animal collections in North America thereby.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: Stevie is a serious devotee of antiques of all sorts, including vintage clothing, and works hard on searching out particularly beautiful old clothes for her stage wardrobes.
• The Highwayman: The Bella Donna song of the same name is a retelling of the famous poem, and also a Shout-Out (according to Stevie) to the male rockers she considers the most romantic, such as The Eagles.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Stevie is 5'2" without her platform boots, so will look tiny next to most other folks, male or female. Especially striking when you stand her and Mick Fleetwood side-by-side; she's tiny next to him even with her boots on!
• Intentionally Awkward Title: "Sometimes It's A Bitch", the single from her 1991 greatest-hits compilation Timespace. She didn't give the song that title (it was tacked on by the writers) and she's always hated it.
• Ludd Was Right: Stevie doesn't own a computer or cell phone.
• Mondegreen: The title of the song "Edge of Seventeen" came from a conversation with Tom Petty's wife Jane, who was telling Stevie about how she had first met her future husband at 17. Stevie liked the way that "age of seventeen" came out in Jane's Southern accent so much that she grabbed the phrase for her own.
• Moral Guardians: Stevie ran into trouble from some fundamentalist Christians in the 1970's and 1980's who believed she was promoting witchcraft or was in fact a practicing witch (due in part to incautious on-stage statements in which she introduced the song "Rhiannon" as being "about a Welsh witch", which is inaccurate; Rhiannon was in fact a goddess in Welsh/Celtic mythology) and due partly to her love of the color black in her clothing. The hassle got so bad on the later count, in fact, that she switched around the time of Tusk to dressing all in shades of white and cream for a couple of years (she's dressed in white satin and chiffon on the cover of Bella Donna). For the record, she has always staunchly denied practicing witchcraft.
• New Media Are Evil: She was highly suspicious at first of the Internet when it became popular, and doesn't like social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, and does not have an account on either, despite several identites purporting to be her.
• Nice Hat: It's not just Stevie's boots that are famous - her top hats, usually accessorized with long flowing veils dropping down her back, are also a core part of her image.
• Nice Shoes: Her platform-soled boots are iconic. (Being over 60, and having suffered several falls of varying severity off stages in the past, she doesn't actually wear high-heeled platform boots that much anymore.)
• Opera Gloves: She often wears gloves of varying lengths on- and offstage (her 2011 "look", for instance, includes a pair of elbow-length black leather gloves with cut-off fingertips).
• Shout-Out: Stevie often gives Shout-Outs to people or places she likes in her songs. As may be expected from her, some of the references are rather cryptic. However:
  • She gave a rather obvious Shout-Out to Mick Fleetwood in "Juliet" ("Dancing to the rhythm of some man's ancient drum").
  • Her song "Jane", from Street Angel, is a tribute to renowned primate researcher Jane Goodall.
  • "Soldier's Angel", off In Your Dreams, is a Shout-Out to the wounded soldiers that she repeatedly visited at the now-closed Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. over the past few years. In a similar vein, "Desert Angel", from Timespace, is a Shout-Out to both the servicepeople who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm and their loved ones. (The sleeve photo of the "Sometimes It's A Bitch" single is a photograph of an inscribed U.S. flag that a fan of her flew from his vehicle during the February 1991 ground campaign.)
  • "Garbo" - the B-side of "Stand Back" - is a tribute to the famous star, and several other old-time Hollywood stars are referenced by name in the song as well.
  • "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You" is a rather cryptic Shout-Out to old friend and sometime romantic interest Joe Walsh.
  • The very title of the album The Wild Heart is probably a reference to the old romance movie of the same name starring Jennifer Jones (who played a gypsy, incidentally - a character type that Stevie has often referred to, occasionally characterizing herself as a "rock 'n' roll gypsy"),
  • In her 1982 Fleetwood Mac song "Gypsy", Stevie Shout Outs the Velvet Underground by name.
• Signature Song: "Rhiannon", "Edge of Seventeen", "Dreams", "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You", "Landslide", "Stand Back".
• Those Two Gals: For her entire career as a solo artist, Stevie's two favorite backup singers have been Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, who appear on every one of her albums and have accompanied her on most of her tours. They're among her closest friends; indeed, Perry was married for years to Stevie's brother Christopher and is the mother of Stevie's niece Jessica.
• Tomboyish Name: Stevie's full name is Stephanie Lynn Nicks. She got her nickname as a little girl because her attempts to say "Stephanie" always came out sounding more like "Tee Dee".
• Woman in Black: Black is Stevie's favorite color (not surprisingly, as black is a good color choice for a blonde). She's made good use of the color to heighten her mystical, "witchy" image onstage. Her black chiffon shawls and gowns are just about as much a part of her image as her platform-sole boots.
• Word Salad Lyrics: Stevie is famous - or notorious - for her Word Salad Lyrics in general. Interpreting the meanings of her lyrics has long been a popular pastime among her fans; she's helped the process along by commenting on more than one occasion that virtually all her songs are autobiographical in one way or another, so fans have long amused themselves by matching up Stevie's often-cryptic lyrics to events and people in her life.
  • Case in point: much of her 1983 solo album The Wild Heart, particularly the title track and the single "Nightbird", make more sense if you know that the album is in significant part part of the process of Stevie working through her grief over the death from leukemia of her closest friend in late 1982 (which led to a very weird incident in which Stevie, out of a misplaced sense of duty to her friend's newborn son, married her friend's widower. The marriage, as might be expected, only lasted a few months.)
  • By Stevie's own explanation (in the interview accompanying her 1981 cover story in Rolling Stone), "Edge of Seventeen", one of her solo Signature Songs, is largely a reaction to the deaths in close succession of a favorite uncle and of John Lennon..
  • "Long Way To Go", from The Other Side of the Mirror, is a fairly clear Break Up Song about the end of an unidentified relationship.
  • On the other hand, "Doing The Best I Can (Escape from Berlin)" (complete with cryptic subtitle) is a heavily disguised recounting of the events surrounding her trip to rehab in late 1986 and her struggle to stay drug-free.