Stevie Nicks says her first solo album was built out of the songs Fleetwood Mac would not take. Bella Donna reached No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 in 1981 and produced three hit singles, turning what she once saw as an outlet into the record that made stevie nicks a solo force.
The biggest hit on the album was Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around, a duet with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. Bella Donna also included Leather And Lace with Don Henley, while seven other tracks were written by Nicks alone, with Kind Of Woman co-written with Benmont Tench and Think About It written with Roy Bittan.
That mix mattered because Nicks had said years later that she never wanted to be a solo artist. In a 2001 interview with Q magazine, she said she only became one because a band does not give you more than three or four songs per record, adding that if she wanted to write a lot of songs she needed another outlet. Bella Donna, she said, was all the songs turned down by Fleetwood Mac between 1975 and 1980.
By the time she was promoting her sixth solo album, Trouble In Shangri-La, the history around those songs had become part of the story itself. That record included two songs Nicks had written before she and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, including Sorcerer and Candlebright, which she said came from the very beginning of the 1970s. She said Sorcerer was from 1974 and nearly went on Tusk.
The friction in the story is that Nicks has always described her writing as something she cannot schedule or manufacture. She said she writes when the spirit hits her, and that she does not make up songs; they have to come from something that touches her somehow. That is what made Bella Donna feel less like a break from Fleetwood Mac than a second life for the songs the band left behind.
She had already been established inside Fleetwood Mac as one of its three principal singers and songwriters alongside Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. But Bella Donna showed how much material was waiting outside that frame, and its No. 1 arrival in 1981 answered the question she had once raised about whether a band could ever contain all she wanted to write: it could not.