The Tragic Story Behind Stevie Nicks’ Song ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?’
Stevie Nicks called the Eagles’ singer and guitarist Joe Walsh the great love of her life, and she even wrote the song “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?” for him. Here’s what we know about Nicks’ relationship with Walsh and the tragic story behind the song.
Stevie Nicks called the Eagles’ star Joe Walsh the ‘great, great love’ of her life
Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks has dated several famous men, but she only called one the “great, great love” of her life – Joe Walsh, singer and guitarist of the Eagles.
“My great, great love was Joe Walsh,” she told the Telegraph in September 2007. Nicks said she fell in love with Walsh at first sight, when they met at a hotel in Dallas in 1983.
“Why do you love somebody? Why do you love them so much that when they walk in the room your heart jumps out of your chest? I don’t know,” she said. “But I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room, in the bar at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas. I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him, and two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.”
Nicks later told Q Magazine that drugs destroyed her relationship with Walsh. “Joe and I broke up because of the coke,” she said. “He told my friend and [backing] singer Sharon, ‘I’m leaving Stevie, because I’m afraid that one of us is going to die and the other one won’t be able to save the other person, because our cocaine habit has become so over the top now that neither of us can live through this, so the only way to save both of us is for me to leave.’”
Stevie Nicks wrote ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?’ for Joe Walsh
In the liner notes of her TimeSpace album, Stevie Nicks described how Joe Walsh told her about the loss of his three-year-old daughter. They were on a road trip in Colorado, and the Fleetwood Mac singer said she could tell that Walsh seemed to be in “a lot of pain.”
“I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows,” she said (via Songfacts). “So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she EVER complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.”
As the couple drove up to a snowy park, Nicks realized where they were. “I saw the park… his baby’s park, and I burst into tears saying, ‘You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn’t you?’ I was right, under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink.”
Nicks continued to say that she wrote “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You?” for Walsh after that trip. “So he wrote a song for her, and I wrote a song for him … Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so many ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive.”
Joe Walsh’s three-year-old daughter died after a car accident
Joe Walsh’s daughter, Emma Kristen, died in 1974 at the age of three due to injuries from a car accident on her way to nursery school. She inspired Walsh’s track “Song for Emma” on his solo album So What.
He had a fountain and memorial plaque in Emma’s honor placed in a park where she used to play, North Boulder Park in Boulder, Colorado (per Daily Camera). Walsh has said that the album title So What stemmed from how he felt in the months after Emma’s death, when nothing else seemed important or meaningful.
Walsh’s other daughter, Lucy, is a musician who has worked with Ashlee Simpson and others. In 2007, she released her debut solo album, Lost in the Lights.
