The song Stevie Nicks thought would “live on forever”

It’s not like there were many cracks in the armour to begin with, though. Nicks had always based her songs on raw emotion whenever she played, and even if someone didn’t understand what was going on in tracks like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Gold Dust Woman’, it was as if she captured a feeling in her melodies that hit you without ever having to hear a word she said.

When assembling material for In Your Dreams, though, Nicks found herself working alongside producer Dave Stewart to craft the next phase of her career. He was definitely an odd choice given his work with Eurythmics, but if he could work magic for Tom Petty on ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, he was bound to create solid gold when paired with Nicks’s witch-like persona.

Whereas Buckingham would help flesh out much of Nicks’s material in the Fleetwood Mac days, Stewart seemed to have a Lennon-and-McCartney-esque relationship with the ‘Gold Dust Woman’, usually filling in the gaps in between her tunes. Although ‘Cheaper Than Free’ was a sketch of a country tune Nicks had been toying with, hearing them flesh it out turned it from a bad joke to an emotional juggernaut.

While Nicks never phoned in any of her vocal takes, she knew that she hit on something powerful when she heard the final playback, saying, “We were both very surprised. I believe in my heart that that song will live on forever. I said to everybody, ‘We have to really treat this song with kid gloves because this may be the best song that Dave Stewart and Stevie Nicks ever does.’”

In fact, there’s a case to be made that ‘Cheaper Than Free’ is actually a better modern update on Fleetwood Mac’s sound than Say You Will. For as great as their true reunion album was, it did feel like a Lindsey Buckingham record with all the members of Fleetwood Mac playing on, whereas this feels like an earnest collaboration between Nicks and Stewart.

While ‘Cheaper Than Free’ hasn’t had nealy enough time to resonate with fans to achieve iconic status, it could very well be standing alongside ‘Edge of Seventeen’ in a few more years. Nicks had grown far wiser than the woman who made ‘Dreams’, but even after decades in the limelight, ‘Cheaper Than Free’ is an example of what can happen when you never lose the drive to make the next classic tune.

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