ABC, Bella Donna solo breakthrough
In 1981, on an ABC sit-down framed around the Bella Donna project, Stevie Nicks talks like someone who has finally been given the keys to her own filing cabinet. Producer Jimmy Iovine gave her a hard three-month window before she had to rejoin Fleetwood Mac in Paris; she kept Bella Donna and Edge of Seventeen off the band’s table because those songs were the album’s spine, not leftovers.
The clip is calm, practical, almost stubbornly un-mythic. Nicks is not fleeing the Mac; she is explaining why a solo record was the only place left for songs that had waited years in a drawer.
