[David]

Originally Posted by kak125

The original vinyl insert of Bella Donna features just one photo of Stevie Nicks. Wearing a black dress with sheer lace sleeves, she peers over her right shoulder squarely at the camera, with a look that’s defiant yet a tad bashful. Next to Nicks are her two co-vocalists on the album, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry. The former sits stiffly on a formal antique couch, studiously looking at the floor; the latter perches on piece of ridiculously ornate wooden furniture, her arm slung over one knee.

That photo is the real start of Stevie's solo career. People gazed at it for days after buying the album that summer. Who really knows why it's so memorable? It isn't overtly sexual, obviously, or splashy or colorful or conceptually resonant—actually, in terms of its plasticity, it's rather staid and subdued. It doesn't strong-arm you from the album sleeve. But it's Stevie's most durable trademark: a mix of the antiquated and the erotic. It's evanescent, like a wisp image you see mentally from napping in the half-light.

Once these sessions moved into the studio, this carefree camaraderie continued. The women sang together live and recorded live with the other musicians, leading to harmonies that pop out of the mix: a twangy chorus on the title track; R&B coos on the anxious Edge of Seventeen; soulful rock’n’roll oohs on How Still My Love. Unlike other rock albums of the early 80s, Bella Donna doesn’t overdo it with synthesizers or production gloss, which gives space for Nicks to bloom as a lead vocalist. She belts out the title track with passionate vibrato, matches Tom Petty’s ragged, wary tone on Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around and provides a tender, open-hearted foil to Don Henley on Leather and Lace.

In a way, Sharon and Lori are still hugely underappreciated. The Stevie aficionado knows them and loves them, but they're virtually invisible to the rest of the world. Kind of a shame, really, considering that they've done everything the great girl groups like the Supremes did, and then some (and for a lot longer).

That Bella Donna turned out as it did is a testament to Nicks’s tenacious belief in her musical vision and songs. This was a hard-fought victory, judging by how difficult it was for her to extricate herself from Fleetwood Mac’s orbit, even temporarily. In a 1981 Rolling Stone interview, she described how being in the band had become a suffocating experience by the end of the previous year’s tour supporting their 1979 album Tusk. “My life was completely wrapped up in Fleetwood Mac.”

That was one of the most interesting moments in Stevie's professional life. She was tired of the mammoth Mac tours and doing Rhiannon and Landslide every night, as she said. So she went to Chile with one of the Mac studio engineers and somehow came back with a refreshing new version of herself and a vision for her path forward. I wish we knew more about it, but Stevie has talked very little about it.

The break was a long time coming, as by the late 70s Nicks was looking for creative outlets outside the band. In a nod to her fascination with things mystical, she had written a batch of songs inspired by the Welsh mythological goddess Rhiannon that were earmarked for a future movie. (The film was never made, although it was far enough along in development to have the screenwriter for David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, Paul Mayersberg, attached to the project.) She also sang on several hit singles, including Kenny Loggins’ Whenever I Call You Friend and Walter Egan’s Magnet and Steel.

Heady days. In those days, believe it or not, we used to get very impatient with the "long" waits between Fleetwood Mac projects, and we looked forward to all the extracurricular work Stevie and the others did.

To ensure that her decisions weren’t compromised, Nicks teamed up with two music industry veterans, future Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg and Bearsville Records’ Paul Fishkin, and formed a label, Modern Records. The idea was that the trio would partner with a bigger label to distribute Nicks’s solo work. As they worked to secure a collaboration, Nicks’s solo ambitions were dismissed or sneered at by male gatekeepers. In his memoir, Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, Goldberg recalled Fleetwood Mac’s lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, derisively terming a Nicks solo album “artsy-craftsy”, while Mo Ostin, then-head of Fleetwood Mac’s label, Warner Bros, decisively passed on the Modern Records deal.

Despite the excitement that Stevie generated in people inside and outside the business, she had even by that time acquired a reputation for being a space cadet with loopy lyrics.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood, with whom Nicks had recently had a fling, also wasn’t thrilled with her extracurricular contract.

Is this documented somewhere? I wasn't aware that Mick had ever expressed disapproval of Stevie's solo plans.

However, she also said this ingratiating approach was meant to allow her to soak up musical insights from men – and by that token, she was wildly successful.

It's part of the paradox of Stevie Nicks that she never really soaked up specifically musical insights from women. She's talked about how Joplin's and Slick's stage charisma left its mark on her. But up until recently, where was Stevie's appreciation for other women songwriters? It was never very pronounced or deep—certainly nothing equivalent to the love she's had for the songs of Henley, Petty, et al.

In the hands of other songwriters, Bella Donna could have ended up solipsistic or indulgent.

That must be a typo.

To British listeners, this may invoke parallels with Kate Bush’s iconoclastic material and command over her own career, several years before Nicks released Bella Donna.

The occasional Kate Bush comparisons are absurd.

That Nicks wasn’t taken seriously as a songwriter before Bella Donna worked to her advantage, freeing her from any pressure except the kind she put on herself.

One wonders why Stevie's seriousness as a songwriter was never picked up by the very men in the business she wanted to please and rival: the Eagles-Jackson Browne-JD Souther-James Taylor axis of West Coast singer-songwriters in the 1970s. Stevie gets a lot of love from other musicians, but they're almost all Gen Y and Millennial.