Songfacts®:

• "Hard Advice" is what you might call one of those "tough love" moments, wrapped in a song. It all began when Stevie Nicks, fresh out of rehab - 48 days of sheer hell, as she'd later describe it - asked her old friend Tom Petty to write a song with her. She was still shaky, recovering from an addiction to Klonopin, and in that vulnerable post-rehab haze, she turned to Petty for help.
  
  "'Hard Advice' was a lecture Tom Petty gave me on his way to Phoenix one night," she recalled to Uncut magazine. "I was having a little problematic moment in my life and he gave me one of his seriously hard advice lectures. He looked me straight in the eyes with those big clear blue eyes and said, 'This pain's gone on too long. Go home, light up your incense and your candle and go to your Boisendorfer and write some real songs."
• "Hard Advice" originally had a more personal touch - Nicks had the lyric "Sometimes Tom's my best friend," a direct message to the man himself. But in the end, she softened it to "Sometimes he's my best friend," not wanting to make the song too obviously about Petty.
• Nicks had known Tom Petty since the late 1970s, and their friendship had a profound impact on her solo career. Petty gave her "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," her very first solo single, which, according to her producer Jimmy Iovine, was the song that stopped her debut album from tanking. It's fair to say that without Petty, Stevie Nicks' solo career might have looked very different.
• Written in 1994 after her conversation with Petty, "Hard Advice" didn't see the light of day until 2014, when it appeared on 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, each a time capsule from various points in Nicks' career. But perhaps none are as personal - or as pointed - as "Hard Advice."