“Liking the Solo albums”

[David]

Originally Posted by BLY

I think that the “fans” that dislike (or hate)some of Stevie’s solo albums are the fans that weren’t fans from the beginning. I do have my favorites but being a fan from 1981 I like all of them. I think if you became a fan later and went back into her catalog you can’t appreciate the progression .....agree?

I used to think there was something to hearing the albums for the first time in the order in which they were recorded. It might be true sometimes but not always. I think what's really going on with those of us who first heard the albums when they were brand new (and thus in chronological career order) is that we experienced that pit-in-the-stomach excitement in the weeks or months leading up to a release. So when the album finally hit, you may have been disappointed in some of it, but you still were coming down emotionally from an elevated state where you were super excited about what was coming—and you lived for three or four weeks with a hit single, a B side, a radio interview or two, and that was all. You were waiting, waiting, waiting. It's that anticipation that stuck with you and marked your experience of that album in a way that going back to an album years later didn't do for you. (When Hold Me was on the radio before Mirage was out, a few of my buddies and I thought the name of the song was Haunt Me. We had to wait for the 45 to stand corrected.)

I remember waiting and waiting for Tusk and Bella Donna—in the latter case, knowing Stop Dragging My Heart Around, reading L.A. Times reviews before the thing was released, and then walking into a record store (buildings that sold records in the olden days) and hearing the clerks playing Edge of Seventeen on the store system and, because you had never heard anything by Stevie that sounded like that, not even being terribly sure it WAS Stevie. I remember waiting for The Wild Heart after having Stand Back for about six weeks (and a date at the US Festival 2). Waiting with anticipation for an album alters your experience of it forever. You're more inclined to hold it in a more positive light many decades later.