Joe Walsh’s opinion on Stevie Nicks

Joe Walsh is probably one of the most underrated guitarists and singers in American music history, the albums he recorded with the James Gang, the Eagles and as a solo artist have been hugely influential and played an important role in the evolution of Rock music, particularly in the United States. Having been in the music business since the 1960s, Walsh has had the chance to meet many of the world’s greatest musicians and has shared his thoughts on several of them, including Fleetwood Mac‘s Stevie Nicks, whom he got to know especially well.

What is Joe Walsh’s opinion on Stevie Nicks

Joe Walsh has long been a big admirer of Stevie Nicks and the two were romantically involved in the 1980s. When asked about Nicks’ statement that he was “the great, great love of her life,” Walsh returned the compliment, calling her a national treasure and praising her as a songwriter, singer, and person.

“(Laughs) I’m very humbled by it. She’s a great songwriter, a great singer and a great person. We spent about a year together. She helped me write a bunch of music, and I helped her write her music. We had a great relationship. Romantically, it shifted, but in terms of friends and respect for each other, that’s all still there. She’s really a great person. Anybody who knows her will tell you that. And she’s a national treasure. Anything she sings, you immediately know it’s her. If it’s on the radio, you don’t change stations, you listen to it,” he told Interview magazine in 2012.

They were both pursuing solo careers when they fell in love and toured together, which Joe believes made the relationship possible. During that time, they also helped each other write songs and collaborated creatively. “She’s special. She helped me do ‘The Confessor’ album. She wrote rode shotgun with me on that one and gave me direction. She’s really good at the craft of songwriting. She wrote (one song) about me. ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?’ (I was in love with her) as a sister. I mean, she’s like a soul mate, you know?”

He continued:

“(We still talk) once in a while. That didn’t come out right (the relationship). All I’m saying is that we were seeking refugee kind of in each other’s presence. That was that part of it (we were both addicted at the time), but we were on the road, we had careers, we were both lonely. The relationship came and ran its course as Rock and Roll relationships do. I don’t think either of us could have committed to a lasting relationship in the state that we were in. What made it possible was that we toured together and we spent all that time together. We were both monogamous for that summer. When we stop touring I had to (drift apart),” he said in an interview with Howard Stern in 2012 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

Stevie Nicks said it was love at first sight with Walsh

‘My great, great love was Joe Walsh. It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ (Why?) ‘I don’t know – 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. 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. Two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.”

Stevie later admitted that she believed Joe Walsh was the man she would have married. However, she also acknowledged that they were both struggling with drug addiction at the time, describing them as “a couple on the way to hell.” According to her, the relationship ended when Walsh got in a plane and went to Australia “to get away from me, basically. He thought – or so I’m told by my friends that Joe told – that one of us was going to die, and the other person would not be able to save them.”

He continued:

“And I did think I was going to die, absolutely. It took me a long, long time to get over it – if I ever got over it. Because there was no other man in the world for me. And it’s the same today, even though Joe is married and has two sons. He met somebody in rehab and got married. And I think he’s happy,” she said in an interview with The Telegraph in 2007.

A couple of years earlier, in the late 1970s, Stevie Nicks had been in a relationship with Joe Walsh’s Eagles bandmate, Don Henley. She never got married. Walsh has been married five times and has been married to Marjorie Bach since 2008. Through that marriage, he became the brother-in-law of Ringo Starr, who is married to Marjorie’s sister, Barbara Bach.

Stevie Nicks said she thought she would never be able to live far from Joe Walsh again

Stevie fell so deeply in love with Walsh that, as she recalled during MTV Storytellers in 1998, she believed she would never be able to live far away from him again.

“I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again, he is my soul. He seemed to be in a lot of pain, though hid it well. But finally, a few days later, (we were in Denver), he rented a jeep and drove me up into the snow covered hills of Colorado, for about two hours. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. But he did tell me a story of a little daughter that he had lost. To Joe, she was more than a child. She was three and a half and she could relate to him.”

“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. 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.”

She continued:

“As we drove up to this beautiful park, (it was snowing a little bit). He came around to open my door and help me down. When I looked up and saw the park, his baby’s park, 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 others who were too small to get a drink.'”

“So he wrote a song for her (Emma’s Song) and I wrote a song for him… ‘This is your song…’ I said ‘to the people’ but it was Joe’s song. 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,” Stevie Nicks said in “Timespace” liner notes in 1992.

Both Joe Walsh and Stevie Nicks achieved enormous success as solo artists and as members of legendary bands. Walsh rose to fame with the James Gang before joining the Eagles, while Nicks became a global star as a member of Fleetwood Mac alongside her acclaimed solo career.