‘The Wild Heart’: How Stevie Nicks Recovered From Tragedy

The album’s title track was already written – in fact it was begun at the time of Bella Donna – but it was completely reworked after Snyder Anderson’s death. Nicks now included a new opening line, “Something in my heart died last night,” and has called the song “real black-hearted. It has an air about it that’s so intense that it just wrenches your heart.”

Beauty And The Beast, the album’s closer, was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film of the same name. “Beauty And The Beast surrounds me everywhere,” Nicks has said. “Everybody I know is either being the Beauty or The Beast. The experience of recording this song was so special.” The released version was a live take, recorded in a converted church and wrapped in three hours. Nicks sang while wearing a long black dress, providing champagne for all of the musicians.

In contrast to the Gothic splendour of Wild Heart and Beauty And The Beast, Stand Back had more prosaic origins. Not long into her marriage, Nicks heard Prince’s Little Red Corvette on the radio. She was immediately inspired to write Stand Back, one of the biggest songs on The Wild Heart, and picked it as the album’s first single. Prince added synths to the recording, flattered that his song had been an inspiration to Nicks.

Prince’s (uncredited) appearance was one guest spot among many on The Wild Heart, an album famed for its many and diverse collaborators. Tom Petty co-wrote I Will Run To You, and both he and The Heartbreakers performed with Nicks on the song; Nicks’ bandmate Mick Fleetwood guested on Sable On Blond; and Toto’s guitarist, Steve Lukather, featured on Stand Back.

Most significantly, singer-songwriter Sandy Stewart co-wrote If Anyone Falls, Nightbird and Nothing Ever Changes, also duetting with Nicks on Nightbird. As one of the most influential female musicians in rock, Nicks conceived it as a continuation of Edge Of Seventeen, where “it’s about the difficulties of female rock’n’roll singers”, but seen now in the light of Snyder Anderson’s passing. “It’s about my friend Robin, it’s about death, it’s a spirit calling,” Nicks said at the time of The Wild Heart’s release. “Wearing boots all summer long is like, always being ready for a flood or avalanche to happen, for the worst to happen. Because when you really look at life, all the money, material things and dreams we all search after could not save one small girl.”

One song in particular, If Anyone Falls, looks to the future and suggests the power of love enduring through pain. It also foreshadows the grand passion of 1989’s Rooms On Fire. “There was a time when I was falling out of one love and into another,” Nicks reflected in the sleevenotes to her 1991 best-of album, Timespace. “Nothing else seemed to matter except this person.” She was speaking of guitarist Waddy Wachtel, a musician who frequently collaborated with her, on record and in performance. She wrote that “he became me, and no one dared intrude upon this union”. One of the best Stevie Nicks songs of all time, If Anyone Falls is dedicated to him.

The recovery: “It’s real strong and emotional”

Released on 10 June 1983, The Wild Heart is, as its title suggests, unbound and windswept; it’s fantastical and melodramatic. Despite the trauma underpinning it, Nicks created the album quickly and was ultimately happy with how she processed her emotions on it, and the bravery this took. In 1983, she characterised it as “more reckless” than Bella Donna, adding, “I’m very pleased with the album because there are no holds barred on it. It’s real strong and emotional.

“And everybody’s heart is wild, so it’s not like I’ve got any kind of hold on it,” she continued. “This entire album was written for everybody and their wild heart. This was very much meant to be shared and given to people to have them just love the idea that they have wild hearts, ’cause I love that – I love that.”

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