Stevie Nicks Reveals How She and Tom Petty Reacted When Princess Diana Died
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty were close friends for many years, and they even mourned the death of Princess Diana together. Here’s how the Fleetwood Mac singer said she and Petty reacted to the British royal’s death.
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty were close friends for years
Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks had a famous friendship, and the Fleetwood Mac star loved Petty before she ever met him. But it took some time for the “Free Fallin’” singer to warm up to Nicks.
“We were a little wary of Stevie,” Petty wrote in the book Conversations With Tom Petty (per American Songwriter). “We didn’t quite know whether to like Stevie or not, because we kind of saw this big corporate rock band, Fleetwood Mac, which was wrong, they were actually artistic people. But in those days, nobody trusted that sort of thing and we just kept thinking, ‘What does she want from us?’”
But Nicks was determined to befriend the musician, and she frequented places where Petty and the Heartbreakers were. “She came into my life like a rocket, just refusing to go away,” Petty said.
The two became close friends and even collaborated on the song “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”
Stevie Nicks revealed how she and Tom Petty reacted to the death of Princess Diana
Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks were such good friends that the Fleetwood Mac singer said she spoke with the “Learning to Fly” singer “for an hour” when Princess Diana died in 1997.
“As God is my witness, Tom [Petty] and I are very good friends. I just talked to Tom the night that we found out about Princess Diana, talked to him on the phone for an hour,” Nicks said in the Rolling Stone 772 Writers Notes (per In Her Own Words).
“He lives very close to here, he lives right down there. So Tom and I are, like, neighbors,” she explained. “And it’s great because he really is my good friend. He’s my best guy friend… Tom and I have been really good friends since he gave me ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.’”
The Fleetwood Mac star was a fan of Princess Diana
Stevie Nicks seems to be a big fan of British royalty, particularly Princess Diana. Her hit song “Edge of Seventeen” from her solo album Bella Donna was featured in The Crown.
The song plays in season 4, episode 3 during a joyful montage after Princess Diana gets engaged to Prince Charles.
“This is the happiest moment we see Diana in the show and we discussed early on the idea of having a song to run across this montage of Diana celebrating with her friends, heading out on the town and to transition the song to play in the nightclub,” The Crown’s music supervisor Sarah Bridge told Harper’s Bazaar.
“Aside from personally being a huge Stevie Nicks fan, I felt that the song captured the spirit of the euphoric happiness that Diana was feeling in this moment,” Bridge added. “Her life was changing forever and she was full of hope and happiness – her dreams were coming true.”
“Edge of Seventeen” was Bridge’s first choice to soundtrack the montage, “and Stevie was by all accounts very keen to have the song featured within the show,” she said.
