Stevie Nicks would never sing a song that wasn’t from the heart. Whereas most artists might like to go on autopilot throughout their careers, Nicks always brought authenticity to every song she came up with, needing to inhabit the characters in her tracks rather than work her way through them without a care. Although most of Nicks’ career was spent working through her back pages, one song still stands out as one of the most pointed tracks she has ever written.
Before she even had a classic to her name, Nicks was often caught playing second fiddle to Lindsey Buckingham, often finishing off her songs with his help on albums like Buckingham Nicks. Once the duo joined forces with Fleetwood Mac, though, Nicks had fully become a songwriter, penning gorgeous prose like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’.
By the time the band had worked out their differences on the album Rumours, Nicks already had the wheels turning in her head for a solo career. Working alongside Tom Petty producer Jimmy Iovine, Nicks set to work on making her identity utterly different from her bandmates on Bella Donna.
Outside of the token single ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ courtesy of Tom Petty, Nicks had a massive struggle trying to write the words to ‘Leather and Lace’. First written for country superstar Waylon Jennings, Nicks would say that a tale of two people in the entertainment industry was one of the biggest challenges she had faced in her career at that point.
When talking to TimeSpace, Nicks talked about the song’s toll on her, recalling: “I worked very hard trying to explain what it was like to be in love with someone in the same business and how to approach dealing with each other. It’s probably the hardest thing in the world to do because it falls out of your hands and into the hands of the world, which tends to want you to not be able to handle it”.
Getting help from Eagle Don Henley, Nicks finished the song with the drummer providing background vocals on the final version. While the tune may have been written about another matter entirely, it wasn’t hard to see how the song about the struggles of romance on a grand stage applied to both her and Henley.
Outside of being two figures of the California rock scene, Henley and Nicks had dated prior to recording and even inspired the song ‘Sara’ about a pregnancy that Nicks didn’t go through with. With voices dripping with emotion, the two singers may as well be singing to themselves, looking to make peace with their relationship that had gone astray.
Despite the massive baggage that came with being part of the music industry machine, Nicks would consider the song a highlight of her career through the years, explaining, “Don and I had been going out for quite a while, and, bless his heart, he did sing it with me, and again, as fate would have it, it became one of the most special love songs that I would ever write… and remains that, even today, after all these years”.
