The 2011 song Stevie Nicks admires the most: “It was perfect”
Any song Stevie Nicks ever wrote tended to be like one of her musical children.
Since she never had a child of her own, all of her personal feelings tended to be reserved for her songs, whether that was her talking about her own relationship struggles or trying to sort out the spiritual side of her psyche whenever she worked on her ballads. But even when working on some of the greatest love songs of her generation, there tended to be a few tunes that accomplished more than she thought she ever could whenever she made a record.
But Nicks wasn’t thinking about making God’s gift to pop songs every single time she walked into the studio. She and Lindsey Buckingham always wanted to create songs that would last, but they were going about it from two completely different angles. Nicks wanted to capture a feeling in every one of her songs, whereas Buckingham would have stayed up until dawn if it meant trying to find the right sound for whatever pop hit he was working on.
That’s half the reason why things ended up getting so tense between them during the Rumours sessions, but while the idea of singing songs about your significant other isn’t everyone’s first choice when they make an album, Nicks wasn’t going to let it get in the way of her job. She knew that they had struck gold by joining the band, and she was going to do everything she could to keep them together, even if it meant screaming at Buckingham in between takes of a song.
Anyone in that kind of environment would have needed to go out on their own at some point, but looking through Nicks’ solo career, it’s not like she needed Buckingham by any stretch. She could make fantastic songs on her own, but there would always be that one thought in the back of every fan’s mind when she came out with a new record. The thought of Buckingham even turning up for a Fleetwood Mac project would have been dead in the water throughout the late 1980s, but sometimes miracles can happen.
Say You Will was a fantastic return to form, even if it was a bit longer than usual, and Nicks even thought enough of Buckingham for him to lend a hand on the track ‘Soldier’s Angel’ later on in her career. Throughout all of their fights, she never forgot about what a great musician he was at the end of the day, and she felt that bringing Buckingham in to record that song was the moment where everything came full circle for them.
They had been through some of the hardest fights that any two people could have gone through, but being able to put their cares aside is what Nicks admired the most, saying, “[It] is truly my most sacred and revered song. We recorded it live and did some harmonies, and then he did some little lead guitar things, and it was perfect. There’s no other players, just me and him. Not only did we create something that’s probably as Buckingham Nicks as we have been since 1973, but… I think that song really brought Lindsey and I back together.”
The fighting wouldn’t exactly stop since Buckingham would be kicked out of the band yet again in the 2010s, but listening to them play off each other, you can tell what Mick Fleetwood saw in them way back when. Her voice and his guitar were meant for each other to a certain degree, and given the subject matter about the hardships of wounded soldiers, Nicks was willing to put every single bit of energy that she could into the song every time Buckingham picked one of his strings.
A lot of the greatest rock and roll bands of Nicks’s generation tend to get bogged down by way too many effects and overproduced songs at this point in their career, but this tune is a testament to what she and Buckingham had always been. At the end of the day, they simply sounded great together, and there was no one who could ever take that away from them whenever they got up onstage.
