Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Bella Donna proves that Fleetwood Mac's blond priestess of the occult can stand on her own as a solo act. With the masterful aid of producer Jimmy Iovine, Stevie Nicks emerges as a tougher, more emotionally direct singer than in her work with Fleetwood Mac. Even though Bella Donna is awash with impenetrable poeticizing, Nicks' musical approach has shifted from folk music toward rock & roll, and this hardier balance – along with the star's hot, growling vocals–helps carry the burden of her rather strange lyrics.

The album's superb arrangements (two cuts were recorded with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while six others feature Russ Kunkel on drums and Waddy Wachtel on lead guitar) are in the mainstream Los Angeles rock tradition of the Eagles: punchy on the bottom, sleek on top. Nicks' voice, with its weird extremes of coarseness and tenderness, has been captured with a fine, hard edge and made to serve expressive ends. Jimmy Iovine was the only producer to catch the full emotional range of Patti Smith's singing (on Easter), and he's done the same for Stevie Nicks, who, with her toughcookie/swooning-princess vocal tics and volatile moods, sounds a lot like a wealthy West Coast cousin of Smith's.

Five of Bella Donna's ten tunes were written in the last two years, and the others date from the mid-Seventies. The title track is a strong, galloping folk-rock anthem of the type that the Jefferson Airplane used to pull off so successfully. "Edge of Seventeen," a wind-whipped wail of erotic frustration, charges along atop an agitated power-pop guitar line. On the softer side, "Outside the Rain" and "How Still My Love" clone the gauzy swirl of "Dreams." In the slinky Tom Petty-Michael Campbell rock ballad, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," Nicks (singing with Petty) mixes rage, bravado and sex like a haut monde punkette. The song also contains the LP's best lines: "There's people running round loose in the world/Ain't got nothing better to do Than make a meal of some bright eyed kid."

Unfortunately, there's more reality in those three lines, which Nicks didn't write, than in all of her misty, cosmic-erotic musings put together. For the world of Bella Donna is a moonlit dream world that's virtually devoid of specific people, places and events. When reality does intrude–in "After the Glitter Fades," an uncharacteristically straightforward number about star-fucking–the singer has nothing more pertinent to say than "the loneliness of a one night stand/Is hard to take."

Both the atmosphere and language of Bella Donna are so insular and self-enraptured that Stevie Nicks' sentiments seem as weightless as those of a pampered, pretty high-school girl. In "Bella Donna," two people (or spirits, or God knows what) "fight...for the northern star." In "Edge of Seventeen," a "white winged dove" is repeatedly invoked as a metaphor for young love. "The Highwayman," a duet with Don Henley, turns sexual competition into a dreamy fable in which the star wonders whether she really wants to "be Queen." "Leather and Lace," another sweet Nicks-Henley duet, finds the couple coyly fantasizing that they're Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. Throughout the album, Nicks is terribly prone to spouting such purple blather as "Heartbreak of the moment is not endless," "Don't you know that the stars are/A part of us" and "The clouds ... never expect it...when it rains."

Granted, Stevie Nicks' lost-in-the-stars eccentricity has its charms. Her role in Fleetwood Mac–as a lovely, loony debutante, neck-deep in idle luxury–provides the group with much of its glamour. Here is a California dreamer who remakes Hollywood's Babylon into an arcane fairy tale and then flutters through her fantasy like a spellbound princess obstinately refusing to be roused out of her stupor. But the chemistry between Nicks' air-headedness and Fleetwood Mac's blues roots sets off a spark that sells millions of records.

Bella Donna succeeds through the same sort of friction. The disparity between Stevie Nicks' rock & roll toughness and her literary ingenuousness leaves an enticing mystery: how can anyone so hip also be so incredibly silly?