Talk To Me

Album: Rock A Little (1985)
Charted: 68 4
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Songfacts®:

  • One of Stevie Nicks' biggest solo hits, "Talk To Me" finds her trying to get her partner to open up to her. He clearly has some secrets; he gets all weird when the phone rings, and she knows there's something going on. Nicks spends the song trying to convince him to spill the tea, but she might not like his answer.
  • "Talk To Me" is one of the few Stevie Nicks songs she had no part in writing. It was written by Chas Sandford, who co-produced her Rock A Little album along with Jimmy Iovine. Sandford had written "Missing You," a #1 hit for John Waite in 1984, so he had the hot hand.

    Stevie Nicks told the story in the liner notes to her TimeSpace compilation: "This was a hard song to sing, but I had loved 'Missing You' and I loved the words to 'Talk To Me.' It took a long time to finish it though, because I couldn't quite get the right feeling on it until one night, Jim Keltner came in to do some drum overdubs; and then he stayed to be an audience to push me a little, to make me get a great vocal. So I had someone to sing to, and I got the vocal. I put some tambourine on it, and it was finished forevermore. That was one of my unforgettable moments."
  • Kind of surprising, but "Talk To Me" is Stevie Nicks' highest-charting song in the US as a solo artist, reaching #4 (although her Tom Petty duet "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" went to #3). It didn't hold up nearly as well as songs like "Edge Of Seventeen" and "Stand Back," and Nicks stopped performing it in 1995.
  • Nicks was still a member of Fleetwood Mac when she released this song in 1985 on her third solo album, Rock A Little, but the band was on hiatus. They returned to action in 1987 with the Tango In The Night, where Stevie is best heard on the tracks "Seven Wonders" and "Welcome to the Room... Sara." She left the band in 1991 but returned to the fold (along with Lindsey Buckingham) in 1997.
  • Like many '80s hits, this one has a saxophone solo. It was was played by Barney Wilen, a renowned jazz musician.
  • The music video was directed by Marty Callner, who also did Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" and Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time." In this post-"Thriller" era, MTV really liked group dance sequences, and Nicks complied with a little choreo in the "Talk To Me" video, joining her backup singers, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, on a dream-like art gallery. We also get that close-up shot where she's heavily backlit, setting her '80s hair aglow. That one you'll see in the Heart videos from this time.

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