Just like the white wing dove, Stevie Nicks’ solo debut soared

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna, which went to No. 1 on September 5, 1981, where it stayed for one week.
“Thank you, Snoopy,” says Stevie Nicks, swallowing tears and clutching a stuffed toy of the Peanuts character that a fan had just handed her. It’s December 13, 1981—the last date of her triumphant first solo tour—and the Fleetwood Mac singer is standing on the stage of the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills. Her closing song is “Edge Of Seventeen.” Three months earlier, Nicks’ solo debut, Bella Donna, had reached the top slot of the Billboard chart; “Edge Of Seventeen” was destined to become not only the album’s biggest hit, but the song with which Nicks would end every solo concert from that night forward.
The seed of Bella Donna had been planted four years before the album’s release in July of 1981. While making its epochal 1977 album, Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had run out of room for “Silver Springs,” a gorgeous song penned and sung by Nicks that wound up relegated to the B-side of the single for “Go Your Own Way.” “Silver Springs” is equal to anything on Rumours, but there was no avoiding the fact that Fleetwood Mac had to juggle three strong singer-songwriters: Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and Christine McVie. It was inevitable that they would go solo at some point, especially considering the infamous interpersonal strife the group had been suffering.
Nicks was the first to go her own way. Bella Donna beat Buckingham’s solo debut, Law And Order, to the shelves by three months—and it beat its pants off on the charts. Nicks and Buckingham had been a recording duo before joining Fleetwood Mac, and their romantic relationship disintegrated during the arduous production of Rumours. To say they felt some competition might be an understatement. That strain had already shown itself on Rumours’ troubled 1979 follow-up, Tusk, which might as well have been an anthology of three isolated solo artists. The drugs and booze didn’t help. Nor did Nicks’ new relationship—working and otherwise—with ace producer Jimmy Iovine, who had a vested interest in seeing Bella Donna trounce the debut by Nicks’ ex.
Bella Donna spun that acrimony into platinum. “What I seem to touch these days / Has turned to gold,” Nicks twangs bittersweetly on “After The Glitter Fades,” one of the album’s four hit singles. Country-rock was no longer in vogue in 1981, but Nicks cut her teeth on country music as a little girl singing duets with her grandfather, an aspiring country artist. That rootsy, nostalgic ache grounds “After The Glitter Fades”—whose name evokes Neil Young’s “After The Gold Rush”—in a vintage tone that feels sepia-tinted rather than outdated. The album’s deeper cuts are less memorable, but none is a throwaway. The gothic waltz of “Think About It” and the drizzly atmosphere of “Outside The Rain” are contemplative and ethereal, while “The Highwayman” is a laidback ballad that closes Bella Donna with the downbeat sentiment, “Is this the end of the dream?” The only times the album sounds like Fleetwood Mac are on its brooding title track—as well “How Still My Love,” which sounds eerily similar to Rumours’ “Dreams” with its pulsing rhythm and Buckingham-esque guitar swells. But neither does Nicks stray far from the expectations of her fans. If anything, Iovine’s production distills the same gravelly majesty that made Nicks the breakout star of Fleetwood Mac in the first place.