Cryptic Stevie Lyrics...
 

I remember Stevie giving an on air Interview for The Wild Heart Tour on MTV. The Interviewer asked her why her lyrics seemed so cryptic? "Like only you or the person you wrote about would know what you really meant"
What are some lines from Stevie songs you would love to know more about?
Here are a few of mine...

1.Storms: "She said every night he will break your heart" - Christine about Mick?
2.Welcome To The Room Sara: "In the never forgotten words of another one of your friends" Frontline badmouthed Stevie?
3.Silver Girl:"The papers she never signed"....what were those mysterious papers?

You get the idea...:rolleyes:

beautiful child: "you fell in love when i was only 10..."

This could take me all night but the first one that comes to mind is "Don't take me to the tower, and take my child away".

re:cryptic lyrics
 

I've never heard this, but it sure makes a lot of sense!:nod:

Oh My! I hope not!!! That sounds awfully wrong :laugh:

I would love to know if "Thrown Down" is really about Stevie and Lindsey rekindling their love affair during The Dance tour. I would also love to know exactly what it was that Rupert Hine did to Stevie that mad it impossible for them to ever be together again....

stevies lyrics
 

i believe some of her songs go beyond the mundane romances, she way beyond that. myths, ledgends and 'visions'

Never heard that one.
Personally, I do not think the "only ten" line is literal.

I agree, 'ten' certainly rhymes better with other words like say 'seventeen'. :laugh:

my favorite line from Silver Girl. I always thought she meant wedding papers.

I assumed it was a contact that Sheryl never signed, but marriage license makes sense too. :nod:


"You fell in love when I was only 10" really intrigues me too.

I'd like to know more about The Nightmare - yeah, yeah, cut & paste lyrics, blah blah blah. But I like it, so screw you. :D

Gate & Garden is one of my faves, not a clue wth she's talking about though.

And I'd like to know exactly who EFO is about. :D

:nod:


Others:
"They say you're not the man for me"

"I can turn all your music on, I can make you feel alive, I am gone but I'm never gone from you, it was just the first time---COME BACK!! Little boy"......


Who are these lines about?

I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT RUPERT HINE TOO!!!

one of my fave cryptical lyrics is frome one (of not my overall) fave SN items, "Space Needle"......."The tar people are back again, sad, very true". My only guess it is a referance to the users of black tar heroin and or any addictive substances both legal and not. I can almost see the mass of slow, shambling, shuffling mounds of what only vaguely resembles humanoid figures, each not visably clear where one begins and the other ends. Distorted faces hidden behind dripping masks, frozen in a perpetual silent scream, sliding along the streets, leaving toxic, sticky residue to capture the unaware and transform it into yet another one of its kind.......great stuff. If you have yet to hear Space Needle, be sure to do so. It's one of her most "real" songs. It is ultra depressing, full of engulfing, consuming apethy, the bitterness of dissapointments, loss of beauty of mind, soul and body, etc, etc. It's a heavy number, so you are in for a bumpy ride when you hear if for the first time

It is likely to be easier to use a fairytale as a metaphor than to explain that one...

Even Lindsey said her songs are HYBRIDS of many subjects...

I suspect Nothing Ever Changes is about Jimmy Iovine..She wrote a demo called Jimmy Come Back.

re:crytic lyrics
 

Let's also not forget that many of Stevie's metaphors in her songs are literary references and other obscure phrases (that she's come up with from God knows where) and can't be taken literally. We could sit here all day until we're blue in the face and we'd never come up with an answer because we don't know the specifics of the situation she's referring to (not to mention we might not always catch that she's using some obscure metaphor or literary reference). I think we try to make her lyrics literal but the bottom line is many of them can never be taken literally and she does this purposely. Damn she's good!

I'm fascinated by the line "She was dark at the top of the stairs" in "Sisters of the Moon." I want to know whether Stevie took the phrase from Inge.

:nod: wow great interp! that line has always confused me but now that makes total sense, i could listen to BC all day long, it's my altime favorite since the first time i heard it.

i agree 100% i feel like i understand the song better now, thanks. :nod:

Yeah, like you've never been to Emmiline. :rolleyes:




:laugh: Of course, I don't think that's an obscure reference, if I recall correctly she just made up the word.

She did make it up, that's what she thought she heard on Sandy's demo. She's probably made up a lot of other things too because they sounded good to her but have no meaning or significance in the real world. After all, the woman's like totally blissed out lol. Someone should start a Stevie dictionary for all the words and phrases she's pulled out of her ass. I mean I love them and all don't get me wrong, they are just very out there sometimes.

I've never thought 'Storms' was at all cryptic. I think it screams Lindsey.
Yes i know there have rumblings about it being inspired by Mick because Stevie said something but really; such a mournful lament about a man who had just dumped her for her best friend? I don't think so.

Stevie says she isn't someone who fights for a man and she would have too much self pride, I'd suggest, to be singing a song like this for man she only had a short fling with who had done that to her.
I don't care how magnanimous she is, no woman would'nt be upset by such a double betrayal.
Stevie said in the MoJO interview that there was an atmosphere between her and Mick for months in the studio (recording Tusk?)after their fling and one of the FM books says she was angry with him for what he did.
Also the fling was kept secret so I doubt Christine would be advising her about Mick.

What others, including Christine, have said however, is that Stevie was very upset about Lindsey not only taking up with Carol but also falling in love with her. Chrisitine has said "'stevie cried and cried."

I think Storms is a sad realization that something far more important than a fling with Mick is finally and really over.

The 'every night he will break your heart' is more likely a reference to the odd nights Stevie and Lindsey still spent together after their official breakup which both have alluded to. And Christine apparently was a confidante in respect of that relationship because they were sharing rooms etc

Stevie 'didn't deal with Lindsey,' she did 'love him from the start' and clearly not all the prayers did save them.

On Tusk I think Mick is the more impersonal 'great dark wing' in Sara.

I'm not sure if you heard the radio interview she did last year but she specifically addressed Storms and confirmed it was about her relationship with Mick. I have it on a CD somewhere so I can try to upload it later.

Yeah, that's what I thought but I didn't know why I thought that :laugh:. But now that you mention it, "Jimmy Come Back" is all coming back to me now :D .

I've always felt that Stevie's relationship with Mick was much more than a "fling". I remember her distinctly saying that Storms was all about Mick. I do think Mick was a true love for Stevie, as distasteful as that may be for some. :shrug:

If you asked Stevie what that crappy song is about through the Nicks Fix Q & A thingy, this would be her response:

"It's about a nightmare."

:rolleyes: *** Oy! ***

Stevie herself said she had no idea what the song was about in The Wild Heart press kit- so, if she doesn't know, then no one does....


Stevie's tendancy to just slop words and phrases together in an attempt to force imagery can be wearing at times- "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Nighmare" being the most notable examples.

HI sapphire sister - oh, I don't dispute that Stevie has referenced storms to Mick.
Just as I know she has said that apparently Blue Denim (a song written after the Clinton inaugaration and which refers to losing someone again) was about her brother.

Or that Say you Will with it's references to electricity of love and fever dance, and a love that comes only once in a lifetime etc is actually about Christine!

Stevie has also spoken of her 2 year relationship with Mick.
And her 2 year relationship with Don Henley.
I can't dispute she said those things.
But I can question how if she was still with Lindsey in 1976 according to some interviews or 1977 in other interviews and Tusk was released in 1979 after a years recording - and if in her Tusk songs she is apparently addressing the demise of those 2 relationships - how on earth she managed to squeeze two separate 2 year relationships into at best 18 months!!

I was a Stevie fan before I was ever a FM fan but I'm afraid I take her interviews with a pinch of salt!

What I can see, is that the ending of the relationship with Mick hit Stevie hard for many reasons, not least that Henley had also walked. Life post LB was not proving as easy as Stevie might have hoped. In that respect I think Storms could well have been 'inspired' by Mick but I don't hear that in that song she is actually 'addressing' Mick.

Ok, here's how *I* interpret that line...

Stevie was the 10-year old with a crush on an older man, but he fell in love with somebody else (his own age or thereabouts). Now, in the song, Stevie's telling that man, who is now assumingly alone, that she's not a child anymore, "pick me".

And don't forget her August 24, 1977 journal entry:

"One more time, on the plane. As usual, Lindsey is his usual asshole self. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that Lindsey and I are at an end. So sad to see good love go bad..."

Slowly? Almost a year and a half after they supposedly broke up during the recording of Rumours?

How are we to make any sense of it if Stevie even can't? :p

So? Stand Back is about a welfare line...apparantly. I don't think there are many people around that believe that story either. ;)

She said:

www.inherownwords.com

So, she analogized it to a welfare line in the sense that you would have to wait if not beg for something from someone perhaps angry with you. That casts a different light on it than it merely being a welfare line :shrug:

Interestingly, there was some discussion awhile back that SB is about LB not coming to her rescue when she married Kim. It was a pretty cool discussion on Nancy's board I believe. The gist of it was she did not hear from LB in the middle of her room, but there is way more to it than that if anyone cares to look it up on www.buckinghamnicks.net

There was an interview in the 70's where she said she was referring to her alter ego - her sister of the moon - who was calling to her because she (Stevie) looked in the mirror and was horrified by how thin she had gotten and though she would die. So, she asked her stronger stage persona to be her sister and help her.

I think GDW and SOTM are both about the alter ego and they are very deep poetry for that.

Yes. Coincidentally, that's what I believe also. For crying out loud, the woman wrote it on her wedding night...she was waiting for someone to rescue her, be that Lindsey or whoever. By her own words, it's an angry song...you are not supposed to be angry on your wedding night, so that says enough about the circumstances surrounding that god awful decision. 'in the middle of my room, I did not hear from you'. In my opinion, she needed to be saved, she knew it was a recipe for disaster.

Really? I do. As Jason stated above she said herself it was a reference to a welfare line and used it in the song as a metaphor, not in the literal sense. Why is that so hard to believe? It makes perfect sense to me metaphorically. And she never said the whole song was about a welfare line, that was just one line in the song.

So basically you can determine for yourself whether or not you believe Stevie's own words that come out of her mouth. In this situation I heard her say Storms was about Mick (at least part of it) so I chose to believe it and you can chose to believe whatever you want. I don't know if I believe everything she says but I do believe her when she says Storms was inspired by her relationship with Mick Fleetwood.

I also want to make the point that more times than not there are multiple themes and ideas going on in Stevie's songs. In other words, Storms isn't totally about Mick nor is Stand Back strictly about someone "standing in a line". Everything is not always cohesive in her lyrics so there may not be an explanation as to "one thing" that a particular song is about.

Yep, and the song Bella Donna goes along with that theme as well and she's said the same thing when talking about the song in interviews. Here are the lyrics I'm talking about:

"And the woman may be awestruck
And the woman may truly care
but the woman is so tired...
So the woman dissappears...

Come in out of the darkness...
And you say...
and your face becomes thin
You never thought it could"

There is the alter ego to the beautiful woman, the Bella Donna...

Oh, don't get me wrong, I believe there is a little Mick in Storms also, at least the beginning of the song. I was just pointing out that not everything she says can be taken for the gospel truth, but I guess we can repeat that till we're blue in the face. :nod:

Yes, I love that. That was from the 1979 Innerview at her Vilma Banky mansion after the band played L.A. But I'd like to ask Stevie whether she read the title of the Inge play & swiped it for her song (because it is certainly a cool image & well worth swiping).

That was a fascinating way Stevie had of coping with physical illness, exhaustion & mental distress: create a double, who can admonish you, steer you back on track, deal with your disappointed parents, & even get sick in your stead. It reminds me of "The Sandman" of E.T.A. Hoffmann, which I doubt Stevie has read, but I like thinking about the parallels.