DISCUSSION: Stevie's songs from Behind the Mask

[David]

I think SECOND TIME is the best song on this album. I wish it had a better lead vocal (Stevie logy & sort of fatigued), but it's a touching lyric onto which I was easily able to project my "interpretation," & the musical structure is all there. Love the use of the dominant 7ths as passing chords, or transitions.

Nice little acoustic guitar song with bad engineering & a bad production idea (the synthesizer lead & the doubled-up harmony vocal by Nicks herself when it should have been Billy or Rick).

I don't like the other two or three Nicks songs at all. The pretense is bull**** & the musical sludge all over the tracks is impossible to ignore. Even by 1990, I thought Nicks as a songwriter was just about dead. I was so sick of hearing about the alter-ego character walking down "long hallways" or wondering "how she would live & die" & so on. Stevie's songwriting formula was Line 1: cliche + Line 2: cliche + Line 3: two cliches + Line 4: back to one cliche + Line 5: make it three cliches + . . . . It took millions of fans to project all their neuroses onto her phony-baloney ABC Afterschool Special romantic melodrama, "The Teen Years: Well Into My 40s."