Stevie Nicks Said She Felt the Most Musically Compatible With 1 Person
Stevie Nicks spent years in Fleetwood Mac and has collaborated with a number of other artists during her solo career. Of all these people, she said there was one with whom she had a special connection. Nicks had a brief romantic relationship with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. They truly clicked when they worked on music together, though.
Stevie Nicks said she clicked with Dave Stewart
In 2011, Nicks released the album In Your Dreams. It was a new experience for her, because she wrote the songs with Stewart. For the most part, Nicks writes alone on her solo projects.
“That’s probably one of the reasons it was the best year of my life,” she told The New York Times. “I always wished that I could write with people. I do write, in a way, with Mike Campbell [a sideman for Tom Petty], who sends me tracks. But he’s not there. So when the thing with Dave happened it was so out of the blue. We wrote seven songs in under three months, and recorded as we went, and my whole idea of songwriting changed.”
She felt a profound creative connection with Stewart. Nicks said it felt as though he could read her mind.
“Dave Stewart doesn’t have an ego,” she said. “He can read your mind. He can read your eyes. If you look the slightest bit like, ‘Oh, no,’ he says, ‘Let’s go another way.’ So you never have to have that pit in your stomach where you’re going, ‘O.K., when he finishes playing this song I’m going to have to say I hate it.’”
Nicks said that the moment she felt ready to make In Your Dreams, she called Stewart.
Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart had a brief romantic relationship
Long before Nicks and Stewart collaborated on In Your Dreams, they had a romantic relationship.
“Stevie was in my dressing room doorway, wearing a faux-fur coat just like the first time I met Annie [Lennox],” Stewart wrote in his book Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life in Music (per Billboard). “Underneath she wore a black lace dress and she had long, flowing hair. I didn’t know who she was, but there was something about her that I was instantly attracted to. Stevie remembers that I looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I want to be your boyfriend.’”
Nicks had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Joe Walsh, and welcomed Stewart’s advances. After a party at Nicks’ house, Stewart fell asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. In the early hours of the morning, aided by what Stewart called “marching powder,” Nicks joined him in bed.
“Stevie is an incredibly talented, soulful and beautiful woman,” he wrote. “There was a fair amount of what I’d call skirmishing that went on. I remember at one point actually falling backward out of bed onto the floor, which made us both laugh hysterically.”
Their romance didn’t last, but they remained friends.
Nicks turned down a song by Stewart that later became a hit
After their fling, Stewart presented Nicks with the song “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” He said the recording session was tense because of the presence of Nicks’ ex, producer Jimmy Iovine. Nicks stormed out of the studio, and Iovine decided they should give the song to Tom Petty instead. Petty helped Stewart finish writing the song.
“The song we wrote for Stevie, or meant to write for Stevie, was ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More,’” Petty recalled in the book Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “We wrote it and started to record it when Stevie wasn’t around. When she finally came in and heard it with my vocal on it, she was put off by it. It was like, ‘I can’t sing that. You’ve already done it. It sounds good with you singing it. I don’t think I could make it better.’ She took a pass, but it wasn’t for her. It was for me.”
The song became a hit for Petty.
