How a tragic event in Boulder, Colorado inspired songs among rock ’n’ roll legends

If you’ve heard the music from rock bands like The Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, the emotional lyrics and recurring brooding melodies from personal life experiences may be familiar to you. Often reminiscing in the form of song on long trips, listeners wonder precisely where these western experiences took place. Was it the Rocky Mountains or the deserts of California?

“Has anyone ever written anything for you?

In all your darkest hours

Have you ever heard me sing?

Listen to me now

You know I’d rather be alone

Than be without you, don’t you know?”

These lines were written by Stevie Nicks, inspired by a Boulder, Colorado experience with Joe Walsh in 1984. 

Twenty-eight days before her third birthday, Emma Walsh who was being driven by her mother Stefany Rhodes Walsh to nursery school was killed in a car crash on the corner of ninth and Spruce St. She is survived by her mother and her father, Joe Walsh, an iconic musician and lead singer for the band The Eagles. Walsh celebrated her life by creating a memorial at her favorite North Boulder playground where she frequented her days along with her mother. 

Rhodes Walsh described her child as warm, funny and often seen falling asleep on the floor of The Caribou Ranch Recording Studio in the Rocky Mountains near Nederland. Regardless of growing up amid the rock ’n’ roll era, surrounded by musicians, drugs and finer things in life, like her father’s bright green Porsche, Emma would have likely remembered moments with family and playing on the playground.

Later that year, after the death of his daughter, Walsh released his first solo album ever named “So What,” on which he had written and recorded a track, “Song for Emma.”“Everyone involved in music sees it as a form of therapy at some level,” said Steve Lamos, associate professor at CU and member of the band, American Football. “Music allows us all to engage with feelings, urges and all sorts of other embodied sensations, even before we have names for these sensations in ways that can be healing.”  

Almost a decade later, Walsh was on tour with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, and Colorado was one of their many stops. Walsh rented a jeep and took a detour through Boulder. Nicks remembers driving through the snowy mountains for a two-hour escapade, to which she did not see the point until Walsh began to tell the story of how he lost his child.

“I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things,” wrote Nicks in her linear notes in 1992. “He decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were, if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she ever complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.”

Nicks claims the story of Emma touched her so profoundly that when she returned to her home in Phoenix, she sat down at her piano immediately and wrote the song, “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You,” in five minutes. 

“So much about music remains unnamed and undefined. This is what makes music special, it lets us feel without exactly knowing what or why we’re feeling,” said Lamos. 

Nicks recalls that memory saying it was, “…the most committed song I ever wrote…” and that “nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore since we took that drive.”

Walsh embodied the typical “rock star” facade and admitted to putting up fronts that offered the idea of him having life all figured out. Though he was sure of nothing in the moments of Emma’s death besides the great loss of someone who was more than a three-year-old, as Nicks put it, she was someone to which he connected.

Walsh dedicated the small, silver drinking fountain at North Boulder Park playground to those who “couldn’t or are not tall enough to take a drink.” 

The current director of Boulder Parks and Recreation, Alison Rhodes, said she loves the fact that Boulder houses the history that influenced hit rock ’n’ roll songs.

“The gravestones are not simply inanimate markers of granite, marble, sandstone or metal–they are narratives that reveal provocative clues about who we were, how we lived and died, what shaped our values, attitudes and traditions,” writes the Boulder Parks and Recreation Department.

The North Boulder Park playground remains a place of magic and freedom for children like Emma, who once enjoyed the 1970’s Colorado sun and the majestic view of the Flatirons.