The album's superb arrangements (two cuts were recorded with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while six others feature Russ Kunkel on drums and Waddy Wachtel
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on lead guitar) are in the mainstream Los Angeles rock tradition of the Eagles: punchy on the bottom, sleek on top. Nicks' voice, with its weird extremes of coarseness and tenderness, has been captured with a fine, hard edge and made to serve expressive ends. Jimmy Iovine was the only producer to catch the full emotional range of Patti Smith's singing (on
Easter), and he's done the same for Stevie Nicks, who, with her toughcookie/swooning-princess vocal tics and volatile moods, sounds a lot like a wealthy West Coast cousin of Smith's.
Five of Bella Donna's ten tunes were written in the last two years, and the others date from the mid-Seventies. The title track is a strong, galloping folk-rock anthem of the type that the Jefferson Airplane used to pull off so successfully. "Edge of Seventeen," a wind-whipped wail of erotic frustration, charges along atop an agitated power-pop guitar line. On the softer side, "Outside the Rain" and "How Still My Love" clone the gauzy swirl of "Dreams." In the slinky Tom Petty-Michael Campbell rock ballad, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," Nicks (singing with Petty) mixes rage, bravado and sex like a haut monde punkette. The song also contains the LP's best lines: "There's people running round loose in the world/Ain't got nothing better to do Than make a meal of some bright eyed kid."
Unfortunately, there's more reality in those three lines, which Nicks didn't write, than in all of her misty, cosmic-erotic musings put together. For the world of Bella Donna is a moonlit dream world that's virtually devoid of specific people, places and events. When reality does intrude–in "After the Glitter Fades," an uncharacteristically straightforward number about star-fucking–the singer has nothing more pertinent to say than "the loneliness of a one night stand/Is hard to take."
Both the atmosphere and language of Bella Donna are so insular and self-enraptured that Stevie Nicks' sentiments seem as weightless as those of a pampered, pretty high-school girl. In "Bella Donna," two people (or spirits, or God knows what) "fight...for the northern star." In "Edge of Seventeen," a "white winged dove" is repeatedly invoked as a metaphor for young love. "The Highwayman,"
This No. 1 album of 1981 features the witchiest of witchy women at a major high point in her career. Her first solo album yielded the still-great duets, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" and "Leather and Lace." Along with the creepy album cover, Bella Donna cemented Nicks' place as the high priestess of music played while going all the way in the back of a van.
