While Stevie Nicks has enjoyed a career that’s spanned five decades, she says her most personal song didn’t come until just eight years ago.
“Belle Fleur,” which appears on the 2014 album 24 Karat Gold, analyzes the difficulties of balancing a love life with the jet-set lifestyle that comes with being a rock star – a subject Nicks says she knows all too well.
“The lyric, ‘When you come to the door of the long black car’ – that’s the limousine that’s coming to take you away,” she says. “Then your boyfriend is standing on the porch waving at you, like, ‘When are you going to be back?’ And you’re like, ‘I don’t know, maybe three months?’ But then we would add shows to a tour and I could end up not being back for six months. It was difficult for the men in my life. I lived that song so many times.”
Nicks goes on to say she eventually solved the problem by stopping the balancing act. “The experience causes you to become one with the road,” she says. “I’m comparing it to the witches in the mountains. That’s just my metaphor with, ‘Mountain women live in the canyon / dancing all night long.’ That’s just us coming back from shows and taking Polaroids all night long.”