20 Fav Stevie Solo Songs

[David]

Originally Posted by mitzo

I love it because it is rambling and chaotic and big. To me it is a classic. Much more interesting than No Spoken Word, which seems to get so much more love.

I'll take Nightmare over just about anything else of hers. It's windswept. It both defies and morbidly revels in death, like a Bronte plot. The narrative drops its guard and its characteristic Stevie poses and just wails. Most fans say you have to read between the lines to appreciate Stevie, but her songs aren't really worth reading between the lines except for this one and a few others, like Dreams. This one is dark, loamy, disturbed, like the undulating carpet in Keats. It's Stevie's "Eve of St. Agnes." Most of her poetry is "gothic" like Lifetime Movie Network or "romantic" like Barbara Cartland or "mystical" like the Mary Leader novel she once read—ersatz art. But The Nightmare is the real deal, and Stevie probably was never even fully aware of it. (The only time she ever talked about it was to Jim Ladd, briefly, in 1986.) It is her drug song, filled with incommensurates and flashes of madness. It's like those images of craggy shipwrecks in Continental Romantic paintings. I love the idea that she never even attempted to sing it live.