The Ballad Stevie Nicks Wrote About Tom Petty After He Gave Her Some “Hard Advice”

By the early 1980s, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty had become regular collaborators and close friends. Petty and Heartbreaker Mike Campbell had already delivered the hit “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” to her 1981 debut Bella Donna. That year, Nicks also appeared, on backing vocals, on Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1981 album Hard Promises on the tracks “Insider”—an earlier song Petty presented to Nicks then decided to keep—and “You Can Still Change Your Mind.”

When Nicks began working on her second solo album, The Wild Heart, Petty delivered another song to her “I Will Run to You.” Of their work together, Nicks once said, “Tom and I love to sing together, and we’ve really developed this relationship, and I’m not really very interested in developing relationships with other men singers, because this is just perfect. We sing well. We have a great time. We complement each other. I love his songwriting—perfect, why bother?”

Lifelong Friends

Both remained lifelong friends after those early collaborations and continued performing together throughout the decades, up until Petty died in 2017, while Campbell worked with Nicks on all of her solo albums from Rock a Little in 1985 through her 2014 release 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault.

“I always thought that she had an incredible voice, but I couldn’t see how her music had anything to do with mine,” said Petty in his 1994 documentary Going Home. “But the moment we started singing together, it all became clear.”

Petty was also a confidante of Nicks’ and helped her through some difficult times in love, addiction, and even prompted her to write a song after giving her some hard advice.

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Petty’s “Hard Advice”

In 2014, Nicks released a song she had written about Petty, and a tribute to their friendship, “Hard Advice,” on her eighth album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault. Written by Nicks years earlier, the song concentrates on the profound impact Petty had on Nicks after one of their heart-to-heart talks. At the time, Nicks had just come out of rehab and was still grieving over a breakup.

“It’s a lecture Tom Petty gave me one day about something that was going on in my life,” recalled Nicks of the song. “I’d asked him to write a song with me—this was about two months after I came out of rehab for [addiction to] Klonopin.”

Nicks continued, “I was still in a fragile state, after 48 days of hell in rehab. And Tom said, ‘You don’t need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.’ And I went home and wrote this song.”

Sometimes late at night

I turn on the radio

Your music fills the room

I just can’t seem to get away from you

Saw a life-size paper doll of you

In a record store

My friends as well as me

Can’t seem to let you go

It was finished long ago

Sometimes he’s my best friend

Even when he’s not around

But the sound of his voice

Well, it follows me down

And reminds me

Another famous friend told me

Love does end

Make a clean break

He didn’t talk about heartache

You have to let him go

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‘Sometimes He’s My Best Friend’

“Tom can be this close to harsh,” Nicks once said of Petty. “You don’t really want to mess with Tom. You’re not sure if he might have a little pen knife in his shoe. When he tells you something, you listen. I have the greatest respect for him and his advice and his thoughts on things. He has an opinion, and if I ask him for it, he gives it to me.”

The lyric Sometimes Tom’s my best friend was changed to Sometimes he’s my best friend since Petty didn’t want any focus drawn to him within the song.

“So I just left it at ‘Sometimes he’s my best friend,’ and when it says ‘Even when he’s not around,’ because I don’t see Tom all the time,” added Nicks. “‘But the sound of his voice, well, it follows me down and reminds me’ of what’s right and what’s wrong. And I love it for the fact that he was able to just give me such a good talking-to that it pulled me out a hole.”

Photo: Stevie Nicks (l) and Tom Petty performing in New York City in 2006 by Greg Allen/Shutterstock