In 1991, Stevie Nicks released her first “Best Of” compilation, Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks, a collection of songs spanning the first four albums of her solo career—Bella Donna (1981), The Wild Heart (1983), Rock a Little (1985), and The Other Side of the Mirror (1989)—along wtih some previously unreleased tracks, including “Love’s a Hard Game to Play,” co-written by Poison’s Bret Michaels, and “Desert Angel,” a tribute Nicks wrote for those serving in the Gulf War.
The third unreleased track was a song Jon Bon Jovi co-wrote with producer Billy Falcon, “Sometimes It’s a B–ch,” a retrospective rocker covering nearly two decades of Nicks’ life.
“When I first heard this song, I really did not quite understand what Jon was trying to say,” said Nicks in the liner notes of the Timespace album. “But over the two weeks that we sang it together, I started to realize that Jon, without knowing it, had sort of taken a time machine back 18 years and watched my life, the good parts and the bad.”
Well, I’ve run through rainbows and castles of candy
I cried a river of tears from the pain
I try to dance with what life has to hand me
My partners bring pleasure…my partners bring pain
There are days when I swear I could fly like an eagle
And dark, desperate hours that nobody sees
My arms stretched triumphant on top of the mountain
My head in my hands…down on my knees
Nicks added, “It was not a love song, which of course, I had expected it to be.It was much more than that to me. Bon Jovi had picked up on the fact, before meeting me, that there was no way he could know what I had lived through without having lived through it with me, so he dreamed.”
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For the song, Bon Jovi dreamed about what the “notorious Stevie Nicks had been like” and how it had affected her over time. “The indulgences, the lifestyle—I felt that if he knew nothing else about me, he knew I had a strong instinct to survive,” added Nicks. “Someday, maybe all the people who did not go through this with us will understand, that considering the generation we come from, we are very lucky to be alive.”
A Hard Time Saying “B–ch”
Bon Jovi said it was a “great thrill” working with Nicks. “Everyone love Stevie, was in love with Stevie or is in love with Stevie through the years,” he said. “She’s been through the whole road show. She’s seen this movie. So anything that I’ve done, Stevie’s seen this movie already, and you have to respect that.”
At first, Nicks said she had a hard time saying “B–ch” in the chorus. “She didn’t really understand it, I think, when I first handed it to her,” said Bon Jovi. “She said ‘I can’t say the word b–ch. I said, ‘Elton John did. You can do it. The [Rolling] Stones did it. You can can do it.”
Sometimes it’s a b–ch…sometimes it’s a breeze
Sometimes love’s blind…and sometimes it sees
Sometimes it’s roses…and, sometimes it’s weeds
Sometimes it’s a b–ch…sometimes it’s a breeze
Once she listened to the song, Nicks realized that it was a “pretty good way” of explaining her life up to that point, and the old adage: sometimes [life’s] a b–ch.
“It really did tell about the tragedy,” said Nicks, ‘”and it really did tell about the great times.”
Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage
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