Feeling some sympathy for Stevie

[HejiraNYC]

Originally Posted by louielouie2000

The root cause of all of this is that Stevie is terribly insecure. She hasn't recorded a new album in 10 years because she was afraid it would not sell. She keeps dredging up musty old demos from her heyday because she's not confident in her songwriting abilities anymore. Further evidence of this is Stevie's using Dave Stewart as a crutch for songwriting on In Your Dreams. She's terrified at the reality she needs to downsize the venues she plays, so she decides to tour with Rod Stewart.

I think it's so unfortunate that the ultimatum/reality check Tom Petty gave her back in the '90s really didn't stick. She's a living legend... and nobody does Stevie Nicks better than Stevie Nicks. Stevie's slowly been poisoning her own well for many years now... I hate she doesn't see it herself.

This is all a bit unfair. I don't know how you could say that a woman with the audacity to tour every year and command the stage at her age is exactly lacking in self-assurance. Self-awareness... now, well, that's another matter altogether...

Stevie herself explained in the radio interviews that there were multiple reasons why she didn't record immediately after getting off the SYW tour- her managers advising against it + she was tired, i.e., burned out. And I'm sure that the trauma of recording SYW was still fresh on her mind. And I can totally relate to being so traumatized by something that you will make any excuse to avoid being in a similar situation again, e.g., getting back into a car after a bad accident. It was a tough album to make and a really arduous tour, which resulted in her blowing up in weight from all of the steroids she was taking for her throat. If anything, I think it was shocking that she would be so gung-ho to get back on the road so quickly in 2005. If you factor in the fact that she was on the road with FM for a year (2009) and then recording for a year(2010), that only leaves 2005-2008 for her to fritter away needlessly. But during that time she went on several solo tours, released two CD packages, released two DVDs, toured with Tom Petty, visited soldiers at Walter Reed, etc. To the diehards, this was a totally wasted period. But I suspect that in Stevie's mind, she was still working, and productively at that, despite the naysayers on her management team and her post-traumatic lassitude.

As for writing songs, I don't think it's purely an accident that she has drawn repeatedly upon her initial cache of songs from 70s over the years. You have to realize that she wrote a lot of these songs back before she was "Stevi Nicks" and then "Stevie Nicks, the solo artist" and then "Stevie Nicks, the Klonopin addict." I'd say there is easily a 15-18-year span between the 80s and 90s during which she was either too busy or too zonked out of her gourd to write songs. Meanwhile she cranked out band and solo albums, one right after the other in rapid succession. As she finally emerged from her fog in the mid-late 90s, she probably came to the realization that her vault was largely tapped out and that she needed new songs and new inspiration to keep her career humming along, which inevitably led her to seek collaborators. I don't fault her for that. However, I do call B.S. on the fact that she considers herself a really prolific songwriter. Yes, she has written some amazing songs over the years. But I don't think she has written enough amazing songs by herself to sustain a solo career and a band career.

Sure, Stevie has nobody to blame but herself for her missteps and her troubles. But if it wasn't for all of the FM drama, the drug addictions, the drug recoveries, the highs and the lows, Stevie wouldn't be Stevie. Unfortunately, she had to suffer for her art.