Songfacts®:

• Stevie Nicks told the story behind "I Can't Wait" in the liner notes to her TimeSpace compilation album: "To understand this song, you sort of have to let yourself go a little crazy. Love is blind, it never works out, but you just have to have it. I think this was about the most exciting song that I had ever heard. My friend, Rick, whom I had known since I was 18 and he was 13, brought over this track with this incredible percussion thing, and gave it to me asking me if I would listen to it and consider writing a song for it. I listened to the song once, and pretended not to be that knocked out, but the second Rick left, I ran in my little recording studio and wrote 'I Can't Wait.' It took all night, and I think it is all about how electric I felt about this music. And that night, that SATURDAY night, Rick and I went into a BIG studio and recorded it. I sang it only once, and have never sung it since in the studio. Some vocals are magic and simply not able to beat. So I let go of it, as new to me as it was; but you know, now when I hear it on the radio, this incredible feeling comes over me, like something really incredible is about to happen."
  
  Nicks' "friend, Rick" was Rick Nowels. This was the first Hot 100 entry for the songwriter, but he would go on to become one of pop music's leading tunesmiths, crafting memorable hooks for the likes of Belinda Carlisle ("Heaven Is A Place On Earth," Madonna ("The Power Of Goodbye") and Lana Del Rey ("Summertime Sadness").
• Nicks says that she did drugs on the set of all her videos of the era, and in this one (directed by Marty Callner), it shows. "I look at that video, I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, 'Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days, so you could have looked a little better?,'" she said in the book I Want My MTV. "It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself."
• "I Can't Wait" was the second single from Stevie Nicks' third solo album, Rock A Little, following "Talk To Me." Her band Fleetwood Mac was on hiatus during this time, which let her establish herself as a solo artist. She ended up leaving the group in the early '90 but released just one album that decade, the poorly received Street Angel in 1994. She and Lindsey Buckingham returned to Fleetwood Mac in 1997, revitalizing the band with The Dance tour and subsequent live album.