Tom Petty Said It ‘Hurt’ Him to Sing 1 Song With Stevie Nicks
Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks first collaborated on her debut solo album, Bella Donna. Their work together was a success and laid the groundwork for a decades-long friendship between the two musicians. Nicks released the song “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” on the album, but she was initially planning to include something else. The idea of letting go of the other song was so painful to Petty that he couldn’t go through with it.
Tom Petty agreed to help Stevie Nicks with her debut solo album
When Nicks set out to record Bella Donna, she knew she wanted it to sound as much like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as possible. She was a huge fan of the group, and if she could not join them, the next best thing would be to emulate their style.
“If I can’t be in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I want to make a record that sounds as much like T.P.’s as possible,” she told her manager, per the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes.
Nicks’ manager, Irving Azoff, reached out to Petty to help her achieve this. He warily agreed to produce a track as a trial run.
“I tried but I couldn’t take it,” he told Mojo in 2006, per The Petty Archives. “It wasn’t like the Heartbreakers, there were so many hangers-on.”
Still, Petty agreed to write a song for Nicks.
He did not want to give her ‘Insider’
While Nicks would eventually release “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the song “Insider” was initially slated to appear on Bella Donna. Per the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours by Zoe Howe, Petty noted that the song was “one of my best songs [up] to that point. I loved it.” During the recording process, he realized that he couldn’t give it up. He took it to Nicks’ producer, Jimmy Iovine, who thought the song was fantastic.
“I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’ And I was really attached to it. And it really hurt me when I did the track and the vocals.”
Petty gently broke the news to Nicks, who took it well.
“And I said, [softly] ‘Stevie, I can’t give you this,'” he explained. “And she said, ‘Well, I can relate to that. I completely understand. I’ll take something else.'”
Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks collaborated on a different song for ‘Bella Donna’
“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” became a huge hit for Nicks, which Petty said was a bit uncomfortable for him.
“They came out roughly the same time, and Stevie’s record was huge,” he told NPR in 2017. “And so it was an awkward position for us because it was billed as ‘Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers,’ and a lot of the radio programmers didn’t want to have two Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers songs around the same period. Especially while one was getting this extreme amount of airplay. So it was a little awkward for us.”
