The Stevie Nicks classic she was never sure of: “Is this the right thing I should do?”
Stevie Nicks was never one to half-arse any of her songs. Half of her songbook is about events plucked from her soul, and any amount of laziness would have actively undermined what she was trying to say half the time. She had already proven herself to be a hitmaker when cutting songs like ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’ with Fleetwood Mac, but when she was served up a classic by Tom Petty in ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, she wasn’t so sure if she was the right person to record it.
Granted, it’s not like Nicks had a problem with Petty, specifically. By the time she got around to cutting her first solo album Bella Donna, she had fallen in love with the sound of the Heartbreakers, openly admitting to Petty on multiple occasions that she would have gladly dropped everything to join them on tour.
While Petty was more than happy to just carry on with his own career, Nicks got the next best thing she could find when going solo: get Petty’s producer. Bringing in Jimmy Iovine for her solo debut, the goal was to make something that sounded like a blend of her normal sound with that heartland style Petty had invented. Everything seemed like it would work, but Iovine motioned for Petty to write her a song as well.
Compared to the other major songs Petty had out, like ‘Refugee,’ he wanted to write something that fit Nicks’s style and came up with ‘Insider’. The song may have been great, but it might have been a little too good to give away, with Petty reeling back on his offer and pulling out the song ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ instead.
This was the kind of subtle bluesy song that Nicks had been looking for, but she still had her doubts, telling Rolling Stone, “When they showed it to me, I was like, ‘Is this the right thing to do? I only get 11 songs, and one of them won’t be mine’. And both Tom and Jimmy said to me, in a brutally honest way, ‘You don’t have a single on this record. And here’s a single for you.’”
It’s not like Nicks could argue with them, either, since the song became her first major solo smash and led to Nicks making another with Petty on her second album with ‘I Will Run To You’. Nicks would soon return to Fleetwood Mac, but the effect of Petty’s song began to outweigh what she did in her old outfit.
Sure, people still love to sing along to ‘Dreams’ and ‘Sara’, but how many people nowadays are going to see Stevie Nicks and expect her to pull out songs like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ or ‘Stand Back’ now? Petty was the one who kicked the door down for Nicks’s career, and even though she was hesitant, she still managed to turn herself into one of the few artists who could pull off being a solo act and a band member at the same time.