The 1985 song Stevie Nicks could never imagine singing: “I can’t do better”
Stevie Nicks prided herself on being someone who pushed herself every single time she made a new record.
There was no point in her trying to rest on her laurels, and even if she didn’t have the greatest timeline for when her albums came out, she knew that anything she made would be well worth the wait whenever she came out with something new. But even with all of the great classics in her back catalogue, she felt that some of the best songs that she ever heard were almost too sacred for her to try and match.
Then again, that’s not to say that Nicks hasn’t tried to do justice to some of her friends’ greatest songs. Ever since Tom Petty passed away, Nicks has tried to do her own rendition of a handful of his tunes, and there isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t at least try to pay tribute to Christine McVie for being one of the foundations of Fleetwood Mac when she first joined the band.
But looking at her back catalogue of reinterpretations, her choices for artists to cover were definitely strange. There are plenty of them that seem to make sense, like paying tribute to Bob Dylan on a handful of occasions, but the idea of someone who wrote tunes like ‘Dreams’ suddenly doing a rendition of a song like ‘Crash Into Me’ by Dave Matthews Band was certainly not what everyone was expecting. Then again, Nicks likes to keep the people guessing to a certain degree.
Not many people would have called her the one to cover Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’, but her version is a fantastic rendition of the kind of excitement that Zeppelin created back in the day. But when talking about the greatest songs of all time, there’s no point in anyone trying to make a song by Kate Bush any more perfect than it already is. Bush was a technician, and anything that she ever did was going to need to have a little bit more attention if it was going to be covered properly.
But even if there have been different renditions of her songs, ‘Running Up That Hill’ always occupies a different space in most people’s minds. This is one of the many songs where you can’t really think of anyone else doing a better job with it, and while Nicks did love the song, there were a few moments where she felt like she wasn’t the person to translate that song for a new generation.
Stranger Things already did a fantastic job introducing the song to new generations, and Nicks felt that Bush’s performance was enough for her to swear off of playing it, saying, “That song I really loved because, what a great writer she is, and ‘Running Up That Hill’ was one of those songs that, when I first heard it, I went, ‘Oh, I wanna record that song someday.’”
Adding, “Every once in a while, we do it, but you finally smarten up and go, ‘I can’t really do that song better than Kate Bush did, so I’m not gonna do it.’ Because if you can’t outdo her, then don’t bother.”
If anything, Bush’s influence is the kind of thing that shows up more in what Nicks does with her own material. She wasn’t going to make a record that sounded as great as The Dreaming did by any means, but when you look at the way that she weaves these stories together, she’s clearly taken some inspiration from the more fantastical worlds that Bush creates every time she makes a record.
So while Nicks did like the idea of making more ambitious musical adventures, there was no point in her going down a musical rabbit hole that she would never find her way out of. Bush was in a league all on her own, and when you’re dealing with a song that’s already perfection, saying that you could do a better version will always be a mistake.
