The one artist Stevie Nicks said “all girl singers” wanted to be
Stevie Nicks didn’t join Fleetwood Mac looking to be any other singer.
She was happy to have written songs with Lindsey Buckingham when they were putting together their first tracks, but at the same time, she was always on the fence about being looked at as a lesser member of the group because she didn’t play an instrument. She liked the idea of making the best music that she could, even if she didn’t have the most technical finesse, and as long as she had the right tone in her voice, she knew that she could work on any song that came her way once she sank her teeth into it.
Because even when listening to songs like ‘You Make Loving Fun’, Nicks could manage to make great music out of a bad situation. Her and Buckingham’s relationship had been on the fence throughout most of Rumours, but even if they were having screaming matches in between doing the background vocals on that particular song, they always came out pitch perfect whenever they saw the red light come on.
But when you look at the greatest female singers at the time, Nicks wasn’t looking to be someone like Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. She simply didn’t have that same kind of musical instrument whenever she sang, but when looking at Linda Ronstadt, that kind of singing at least felt attainable compared to everything else that she was working on at the time. This was a woman singing country music in the only way she knew how, and that honesty is what Nicks attached to over anything else.
And considering how many great female singers have come up in her wake, Nicks felt that no other songstress would have been able to make the music they could without Ronstadt coming first, saying, “I had to dump trying to sound like Linda. I think all girl singers [who] started out after Linda that became very famous all wanted to be her and wanted to sing like her, but we can’t. So we all had to find our inner Linda and then we can move on with our lives and our career.”
But you aren’t really going to mistake any of Nicks’s vocals for one of Ronstadt’s songs. For one thing, Ronstadt had a much more picky selection of songs whenever she worked on her records, and while Nicks could sing her heart out every single night on ‘Rhiannon’, she was never going to be to mellow things out and make something that was as sophisticated as what Ronstadt did on What’s New.
Then again, Nicks’s superpower was all about writing her own material. Sure, she would have some help from Buckingham to help flesh out a lot of her songs, but some of the biggest parts of her records were about trying to find the best lyric that tied a song together, whereas Ronstadt was more comfortable singing someone else’s song that resonated with her, rather than focus on what her own songwriting chops were.
That said, Nicks’s own way of not sounding like Ronstadt was far more compelling than what every other female singer was doing at the time. No one else was thinking of having that same smoky timbre to their voice, but whenever you heard one of her solo songs on the radio, you could immediately tell it was her by the way that she sang, whether it was the more intense numbers like ‘The Chain’ or when she managed to bring everything down when working on ‘Landslide’.
A lot of her chops came from watching Ronstadt sing and hearing what a woman could do in a rock context, but the biggest lesson she could have been taught was about trying to be herself even in the face of a legend. She was never going to be Ronstadt, so she might as well try to make something of herself when making her own tunes.
