Stevie Nicks‘ solo career hit full swing with her massive 1983 album The Wild Heart, as she further established herself outside the work she did with Fleetwood Mac. It seemed like it was one big single after another for her in the ’80s, and “If Anyone Falls” ranks up there with her best work.
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What is the song about? Which fellow musician inspired such deep emotion in Nicks? And who was the co-writer that began a long association with Nicks via this track? Let’s find out all there is to know about “If Anyone Falls.”
Something Wild
The doors swung wide open for solo projects from Fleetwood Mac members at the beginning of the ’80s, and the three principal songwriters in the band, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, and Nicks, all rushed through them. All enjoyed success, but it was Nicks who thrived the most. Her debut solo album Bella Donna rose to the top of the charts in 1981.
That meant there was high demand for a follow-up from Nicks. It also meant that her schedule intensified. In between recording and touring behind Bella Donna and then putting together The Wild Heart, she had to squeeze in the sessions for the 1982 Mac album Mirage. And it wasn’t like she was holding out on her former band, as her song “Gypsy” made for one of the album’s biggest singles.
Still, she was always in search of material. Gordon Perry, the producer of The Wild Heart, was also working with a singer/songwriter named Sandy Stewart. Stewart presented him with a synth-driven instrumental, and Perry decided to pass it along to Nicks, who loved it. Nicks put lyrics to it, with the end result being “If Anyone Falls.” So began a long writing partnership between the two women.
Who is “Anyone”?
Nicks has never shied away from writing about her famous romances in her songs. Plenty of those songs detailed the negative side of love. But “If Anyone Falls” speaks of an all-encompassing type of relationship that’s so enriching it feels separate from any other of its kind. Nicks explained the meaning thus:
“There was a time when I was falling out of one love and into another, when nothing else seemed to matter except this person. I adored him. He was everything I wanted to be; a real rock and roller and a lover of the Stones, small and frail sometimes, but in many ways the strongest person I had ever known. His word was law. I became him. He became me, and no one dared intrude upon this union.”
So who was this “real rock and roller” Nicks is describing? None other than ace guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who played on not only Nicks records, but also with just about every West Coast singer/songwriter of note in the ’70s and ’80s. He tackles lead guitar on “If Anyone Falls,” and he’s joined on the track by E Street Band legend Roy Bittan, who provides the lush synthesizers that were first imagined by Stewart’s demo.
What is the Meaning of “If Anyone Falls”?
What’s so clever about “If Anyone Falls” is how it tries to reconcile the deep feelings the narrator has for this other person with skepticism about how a relationship between the two will work out. And he says if anyone falls in love / It will be one of us, Nicks sings. In other words, maybe the world isn’t meant for lovers, but this pair has as good a chance of making it as anybody.
Nicks has always possessed an innately idiosyncratic way of phrasing things that only the most unique songwriters have. I am dealing with a man, she begins one verse, and you expect that annoyance or frustration will come next based on that opening. Instead, she follows it up with When away from me / stays deep inside my heart. Elsewhere in the song, she talks about having been lost about how to behave in a relationship, only to be given confidence by this new scenario: I’ve never seen anything like you.
The song continues to vacillate between possibility and reality, until the refrain seems to admit that their happily-ever-after might only be a reverie, one found Somewhere in the twilight, dreamtime / Somewhere in the back of your mind.
“If Anyone Falls” found Stevie Nicks deeply in love and deeply in doubt, and utterly captivating in both states.
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Photo by Mike Coppola/WireImage
