Rooms On Fire: The Story Behind Stevie Nicks’ Blazing Love Song

Creatively, Nicks was at a zenith in the late 80s. Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album, Tango In The Night, had proved a mega-seller, and though Nicks was in a fragile, post-rehab state, her finest track on the album, Welcome To The Room… Sara, was one of the best Stevie Nicks songs to date: a jittery, autobiographical account of checking in to the Betty Ford Center, where she received treatment for cocaine addiction.

However, as an aid to her recovery, Nicks was prescribed the tranquilizer Klonopin. She became dependent on the sedative for eight years, the medication eventually leaving her memory seriously impaired and her creativity blunted. This would reach its frustrating peak as she made her 1994 album, Street Angel; but the Klonopin use was already starting to affect her wellbeing. While Rooms On Fire sounds big, beautiful and alive with possibility, Nicks herself was feeling vulnerable.

The metaphor: “I always seem to be running”

“Alice is Stevie writing about Alice in parallel back to Stevie,” Nicks said in 1989, in the promotional video Reflections From The Other Side Of The Mirror, which was issued ahead of the album’s 11 May release. “I’m really writing about Alice’s adventures in comparison to my adventures.” The album’s title made the link clear, and what particularly drew Nicks to Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was the idea of constant movement between two spaces. She related this to the two separate domains of her solo career and her part in Fleetwood Mac; she also saw the metaphor in the travel between her public persona and her private life – “which there isn’t very much of”, she said about the latter, “but I always seem to be running, to one place or another”.

But Nicks was crystal clear, at this point, that she only wrote about things that had happened to her, and that she did not write fiction; the imagery she used in Rooms On Fire was to enhance the autobiography and not to create a new story. “My purpose is to document this incredible adventure,” she said, “before the years have become too clouded.”

The break-up: “The fire had been stolen from us”

The Nicks-Hine love affair was, in the end, relatively brief. Following their time in the castle, the producer went on ahead to London to mix the recordings; Nicks followed a month later, but it was the beginning of the end. “Something happened to him that simply made it impossible for us ever to be together again. I left him there… the rooms were still burning, but the fire had been stolen from us,” she said.

Nicks went back to Los Angeles “a very changed woman”, she said. However, the hot memory of that love affair was branded in her memory.

The release: “My mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife”

Released as a single on 24 April 1989, Rooms On Fire was accompanied by a promo video that mixed past aristocratic and current Hollywood glamour. A big hit in 1989, it cemented Nicks’ status as a solo artist, reaching the Top 20 in both the US and the UK, and it has remained a beloved radio staple ever since. The song’s success must have helped Nicks’ confidence in her own music, and was likely a contributing factor to her decision to leave Fleetwood Mac in 1990. The 1991 release of the Timespace collection underlined the quality of a solo career that had begun a decade earlier, with the release of Nicks’ debut album, Bella Donna.

In her personal life, and just as she explored in Rooms On Fire, Nicks never had children, nor wed again following a three-month marriage to Kim Anderson, in 1983. Yet she has spoken of the joy she finds in her extended family, her philanthropy and her work as a minister with the Universal Life Church. In 2001, Nicks reflected on this, while subtly revisiting the inspiration for Rooms On Fire. “My mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife,” she said. “Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better.”

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