Released July 27, 1981 Bella Donna
(1981) The Wild Heart
(1983) Release date 27 July 1981 Producers Jimmy Iovine, Tom Petty | Length 41:55 Artist Stevie Nicks Label Modern Records | |
Recorded Autumn 1980 – Spring 1981 Genres Rock music, Pop music, Pop rock, Soft rock, Country rock Similar Stevie Nicks albums, Rock music albums | ||
Bella Donna is the debut studio album by American singer, songwriter and Fleetwood Mac vocalist Stevie Nicks. Released on July 27, 1981, the album reached number one on the US Billboard charts in September of that year. Bella Donna was awarded platinum status by the RIAA on October 7, 1981, less than three months after its release, and has since been certified quadruple-platinum. Bella Donna spent nearly three years on the Billboard 200 from July 1981 to June 1984. The album has sold over 6 million copies in the US alone with approximately a million copies since 1991 in the US according to Nielsen Soundscan. It is Nicks' best-selling solo album to date.
Contents
The album spawned four substantial hit singles during 1981 and 1982: the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers-penned duet "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" (#3), the Don Henley duet "Leather and Lace" (#6), the iconic "Edge of Seventeen" (#11), and country-tinged "After the Glitter Fades" (#32).
Bella Donna would mark the beginning of Nicks' trend of calling upon her many musician friends and connections to fully realize her sparse demo recordings. Along with friends Tom Petty and Don Henley, Nicks brought in session musician Waddy Wachtel, Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band pianist Roy Bittan, and Stax session man Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker T. & the MGs. Though Bella Donna's personnel list includes some 20 musicians, the album is very much Nicks' own work, with all but one of the songs on the record written by her.
The album also marked the first recording featuring Nicks' backing vocalists, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, who still record and tour with Nicks today.
The album was also included in the "Greatest of All Time Billboard 200 Albums" chart.
History
Nicks began work on Bella Donna in 1979, in between sessions for her third album as part of Fleetwood Mac, Tusk, released in October that year. Nicks recorded various demo versions of songs early and mid-1980 but these recordings were not used on the album. Following the end of the Tusk tour on September 1, 1980, work with a full band of other musicians commenced under producer Jimmy Iovine.
Recording sessions continued until the spring of 1981 when the final songs for the album were completed: "Edge of Seventeen" and "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around". The 10-song, 42-minute album Bella Donna was released in the summer of 1981. A number of finished songs did not make it on the album, including "Blue Lamp", which was released instead on the Heavy Metal soundtrack later in 1981, and "Sleeping Angel", released on the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack in 1982. These two songs were included on Nicks' Enchanted boxed set in 1998, along with another unused Bella Donna session song, "Gold and Braid". Three more songs from these sessions, "If You Were My Love", "Belle Fleur" and "The Dealer," were finally released on Nicks' 2014 album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault.
On her Enchanted boxed set release in 1998, remastered versions of some Bella Donna tracks ran noticeably longer in some instances, notably "Leather And Lace".
Video footage of the album sessions can be found on the DVD portion of Nicks' 2007 retrospective release Crystal Visions – The Very Best of Stevie Nicks.
Rhino released an expanded version of Bella Donna on November 4, 2016. This includes three discs. The first disc is the remastered original album. The second disc includes outtakes, alternative versions, demos and more. The third disc consists of live tracks from Nicks' "White Wing Dove" tour 1981, recorded at the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles, California on December 13, 1981.
Track listing
Bella Donna: Deluxe Edition (Rhino, 2016)
(*) denotes previously unreleased
Personnel
Tour and HBO television special
Nicks underwent a short national tour in support of the album, starting on November 28, 1981 and finishing on December 13, 1981. The final night at The Wilshire Fox Theatre in Beverly Hills was recorded by HBO for a television special and later released on VHS and Laser Disc video in many territories by CBS/Fox in 1982 as White Wing Dove – Stevie Nicks in Concert. The whole show was recorded, but only 9 tracks ("Gold Dust Woman", "Gold And Braid", "I Need to Know", "Outside The Rain", "Dreams", "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around", "Sara", "Edge of Seventeen" and "Rhiannon") were shown on the TV special and released to video. On the 2016 Bella Donna Deluxe Edition, 14 tracks from the show were remastered and released (Disc 3). Previously, only two tracks ("Edge of Seventeen" and "Gold And Braid") were found on the 1998 boxset The Enchanted Works of Stevie Nicks. "Blue Lamp" and "Think About It" were recorded and received audio broadcast on radio but were not televised, and as such have never been officially released.
The live performance of "Leather And Lace" was, however, used as a video promo for the single release (even though it was a solo version and did not feature Don Henley), and did surface on the 1986 VHS collection I Can't Wait, which featured six of Nicks' promo-clips between 1981 and 1985. These six promos were released on DVD as a special feature to the Australian issue of Fleetwood Mac – Mirage Tour in 2007.
Nicks' 2007 retrospective Crystal Visions – The Very Best of Stevie Nicks included the full live 1981 clip of "Edge of Seventeen" on the DVD supplement, with optional commentary from Nicks. She admits that her tears at the end of the song were due to her thoughts of having to join Fleetwood Mac in France the following day to begin recording the Mirage album, one of the key reasons why the 1981 tour was so short.
The White Wing Dove performance remains unreleased in its entirety, although it has been circulating for many years amongst fans as a bootleg.
- "Gold Dust Woman"
- "Think About It"
- "Outside The Rain"
- "Dreams"
- "Angel"
- "After The Glitter Fades"
- "Gold and Braid"
- "I Need to Know" (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cover)
- "Sara"
- "Bella Donna"
- "Blue Lamp"
- "Leather And Lace"
- "How Still My Love"
- "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around"
- "Edge of Seventeen"
- "Rhiannon" (encore)
Songs
1Bella Donna5:22
2Kind of Woman3:12
3Stop Draggin' My Heart Around4:03