He stared at Christine a lot in the Dance, too! :xoxo:

He was staring at Christine every time he was standing back from his mic and not singing.

Checking to see she was still at the keys and hadn't taken off to England in the band's jet.

She could fly back during a show now, and it wouldn't matter, since she only fake plays now.:distress:

Thrown Down wasn’t written in the 2000’s when he was married with kids though. It was written in 1997 during whatever weirdness was happening on The Dance tour. And he certainly was also participating in whatever that was. Kissing her head in that interview, telling rolling stone they aren’t getting back together yet but nothing’s impossible, that weird kiss during the Landover show, etc etc.

We could be critical of her choosing to release that song while he was married with kids, but it definitely wasn’t written in or about that present time so it’s not really an insult to the family he had by then. She wasn’t saying he’s in love with her in 2003, just that he fell for her again in 1997.

Fall From Grace was also written in the 1997 time period. I think the only song I can think of off hand that was written about him after he was married with a family was You May Be The One, which isn’t really about him pining for her as much as it’s about her being sad that they just weren’t meant to be (though it does mention Lindsey saying it took “years of regret and pain” to get past it). And I think My Heart is probably about Lindsey as well and may have been written post-1997 (not sure though since it was originally recorded in the TISL sessions that Fall From Grace and Thrown Down were recorded in, and both of those were 97). That one’s actually more so her pining for him though.

Her songs are hardly disrespectful to his family. There is artistic license for songs. Even when she is legitimately trying to give us a meaning for some of them there are at least three or four inspirations for a song or a verse in those songs. Stevie has outright insulted Lindsey plenty in interviews without my having to search for insults within her song lyrics, especially when I read Lindsey’s own lyrics.

Thank you for all of this. It's fascinating!
I never knew about You May Be the One. I had figured Stevie's last songs written about Lindsey were done in 1996-2000.

Yeah it’s definitely about him but I have no idea when it was written or what era it’s set in. Since it includes them kissing and fighting on a beach, I can’t imagine it being set in any recent time. Probably is about something that happened a long time ago. So, you could probably throw that out too if we’re trying to find a song about him that takes place post-marriage and kids.

Is "I Don't Care" about Lindsey?

That’s interesting. I have always assumed that Fall From Grace was about Christine walking out in 1997. (“It’s not enough that you saaaay you love me…”)

thanks for this, good to hear that some of the songs have a different / more healthy premise, telling what the songwriter is feeling, instead of projecting the feelings on someone else.

didn't Dave Stewart write the music for You May Be The One? i actually heard and liked that song, musically.

I don’t know if she’s ever said who that one’s about.


Maybe some parts could possibly be about the whole The Dance tour in general, but Stevie repeatedly said most of it is about Lindsey and that he knows it and has heard it. I believe FFG, Thrown Down, and Love Changes were all written around the same time and all were about her and Lindsey in 1997.
The “say you love me” thing is interesting though because I’ve noticed her bringing seemingly unrelated FM references into other song lyrics, be it consciously or subconsciously. For example in You May Be The One she has those lines “He says ‘I’m so afraid’” / “tell me another lie” which seem pretty intentional. She also uses the phrase “mystery to me” in that same song but that one’s probably a total coincidence.


Yep. You May Be The One was a poem in her journal. Dave liked it and helped her put music to it.

I don't know if the early parts of You May Be The One are about the time during The Dance or about the making of the SYW album.. the bit about "you may cry the tears/but the tears aren't really for me" could be one of their let's-get-honest convos during the Dance time or that section in the DR doc where they are alone in the studio and he gets teary talking to her about how much making the album means to him and how he sees it as a chance to make up for things in the past etc..

"the kiss/right out there in the universe" seems to be about the onstage kiss. Or the RS interview kiss... both during The Dance time. "you may take my hand/you who demand so much" makes me think of them holding hands as they walk out onstage on the DR tour (which was clearly shown in the DR doc ... maybe they held hands walking out onstage during The Dance tour)

The ending bit about "I hear the islands calling/I hear angry words/Flying across the ocean/like some seabirds, never stopping" is about after they finished SYW and she went off to Hawaii as did Mick, and LB was still in LA finishing mixing etc and there were fights about the running order and final number of songs.

This is one of the songs she has said is all about him and he knows it's about him. Just like Thrown Down. I have never heard her say that FFG was about him or that he knows this (though the lyrics could well be).

This is one of my favorite things about SN’s writing. All the lines that mean something specific, often said in a more poetic way, and you just have to listen line by line trying to figure out what it all means and put the story together. I don’t always love all her songs or all her vocals in her older years, but I’ll never tire of the story telling aspect. It really is fun to put it all together like a puzzle and figure out exactly what she means. Lindsey’s writing is often the same way. I listen to him less often but when I do, I’m doing the same thing. Trying to understand what he’s talking about and read between the lines until the story starts making sense.

It was her interview w/ Jim Ladd in the mid 2000s where she said that stuff about FFG being all LB: “Fall From Grace was a formal full-on poem…you know ‘maybe I worked this hard just to make sure you survive’… I wrote that poem about Lindsey and Lindsey knows that and he doesn’t care. He loves being inspirational and he is and I am to him. So we laugh about that. So I write these really, really heavy poems. I think I wrote most of that when we were out on the road on The Dance.”

And then I suppose there’s the “Sara” type of song, with several different people — friends, lovers, family — floating around in various places, in various epochs, a stanza for this, a stanza for that. It’s very nonspecific, unlike something like “Destiny Rules,” which seems to describe a person and a string of events, all very closely tied.