Stevie Nicks says 1989’s The Other Side of the Mirror “was the last good record I made,” and there’s a reason for that: Most of the next decade was lost in a haze of tranquilizers.
“They’re called ‘tranquilizers’ for a reason,” she tells Rolling Stone. “You stop being so committed. This doctor had me on it for eight years. … This doctor was a groupie. He just wanted me to tell stories about rock and roll. So, he kept upping my dose for years.”
Eventually, Nicks was forced into an excruciating 47-day rehab. “Finally, I said, ‘I’m taking enough Klonopin every day to sink a boat,” she remembers. “That’s why I gained all this weight, and that’s why my writing is terrible, and that’s why The Other Side of the Mirror was the last good record I made.”
She rebounded in a big way with a well-received comeback album with Dave Stewart and, more recently, has returned to some of her best-known unreleased demos for a new album called 24 Karat Gold. A tour with the reunited Fleetwood Mac will take her into the winter.
As for The Other Side of the Mirror, Nicks adds that it’s “probably my favorite album. It was a really intense record. I had gotten away from cocaine in 1986. I spent a year writing those songs. I was drug-free, and I was happy.”
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