The Wild Heart... what is the big deal with this CD?

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by David

I agree with trackaghost. I remember what a rush this album was because it was so vocally confident & rapturous. If you first heard that title track when it was new, you had never heard anything like that vocal from Stevie Nicks. (You already had poignant hints of it on the Fleetwood Mac tour that happened bfore "The Wild Heart.") Stevie was spreading her wings & flying on the newfound confidence of having scored with "Bella Donna" & her fans were flying along with her. They played "Stand Back" on the radio just before Stevie's appearance at the US Festival, & the Macheads all wanted to go to that US Festival to see her. There really was electricity in the air, & it carried through the summer as we all got to see her solo, playing cavernous sports arenas (for essentially the first time by herself). Jim Ladd "innerviewed" her that summer & a lot of us Macheads went down to KMET to camp out & wait for her. The whole shebang was in love with Stevie Nicks -- she said in interviews back then that "My audiences & I are all in love," & it was true!

In more specific terms, the album has a lot of the flaws that her solo albums all have: in terms of instrumentation, arrangement & production, it's mainstream & mundane. I can't think of a single work by the L.A. studio session scene that has left any important mark musically as an aesthetic milestone. Rock & roll is a band scene, not a hire-guys-for-their-chops scene.

The real beauty of "The Wild Heart" is Stevie's singing. Her songwriting is pretty wild, too, & appealing because if you're still 33 years old & you look like a million bucks in your chiffon & custom plats, your incoherent, weird, feverish fantasies & schoolgirl ideas of mysticism actually hit home pretty powerfully.

Bless you for this - ITA - I was not in Calif. I was about 15 years old and living in Lafayette, Louisiana. People there were camped outside of Raccoon Records, there were really no HMV's then :lazugh: - the night before to get this record. That is how popular she was then. When I got it, I reveled in the high notes she pierced unflinchinly as well as the groovy artwork and romantic undertones. I remember going to NYC with my parents soon thereafter and people were humming Stand Back in the hotel as it was playing over the speakers. I remember her coming in concert and I could not go and me and a few of my friends being HEARTBROKEN after failing to convince out teacher to let us take the test at another time instead of the day after the concert.

I think WH was the end of an era for her and I loved having been able to have lived through that and witnessed it.

Thus, I love the record and take it for what it is. BD is, however, my favorite.