The band Stevie Nicks likens to a modern Fleetwood Mac
Any rock and roll band is usually better off trying to be original than copying everything that has come before. It’s impossible not to draw from your influences a little bit, but when you start sounding more like a nostalgia act, it’s easy for people to call you out as copycats rather than coming up with anything new. But for Stevie Nicks, she knew how to separate the true artists from the fairweather musicians, and the ones that stick around are the ones that have the same spirit as her.
But when looking at Nicks’ career, it’s hard to put her music into words. There are many songs that would have come off as either boring or pretentious in anyone else’s hands, but when she sings about a seductive drug queen on ‘Gold Dust Woman’ or an old Welsh witch in ‘Rhiannon’, she sounds like she’s experienced those tales firsthand and has to sing to exorcise her inner demons.
While her time with Fleetwood Mac is commonly thought of as some of the greatest music of the 1970s, it’s easy to see some of her songs rubbing off on the next generation. ‘Dreams’ didn’t become one of the biggest classic rock viral moments by accident, and that’s because she relies on creating an atmosphere to set the mood rather than hit someone over the head with hooks over and over again.
That kind of atmosphere isn’t something that can be copied all too often, but the biggest names in alternative music are the ones taking that in a different direction. People like Miley Cyrus may have taken the basis of Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ when making songs like ‘Midnight Sky’, but in terms of pure musicality, Nicks thought that Haim had everything that made Fleetwood Mac great years before.
The Haim sisters probably don’t have as much emotional baggage as dealing with couples in a band, but Nicks could hear the strains of her old band in their music just the same, saying, “[They are] something that I have never heard before. But coming from Mick Fleetwood’s great love of their kind of percussion, for me in a way, it’s like coming home. They could certainly all have been in Fleetwood Mac.”
So, if they sound like something Nicks has never heard before, how the hell would they be the next generation’s Fleetwood Mac? After all, the whole point of any band is to pave the way for something new, but despite having a retro feel to their music, Haim has always taken the bones of what made those old songs work and put a modern twist on them throughout each part of their career.
Even though their debut sounds most indebted to classic pop music, Women in Music Vol III showed them taking chances and uncovering potential no one had heard before. And while I Quit had another change in direction, it isn’t all that different from them getting weird in their own way, almost like their version of Tusk if they decided to go in a more electronic direction than whatever the hell Lindsey Buckingham was going on the Mac’s double album.
Most people would only be scared to meet their heroes, but Nicks’ feelings towards the new generation were about more than looking hip with the younger generation. For the last few years, Nicks has become the cool aunt of popular music, and while she may not sound like the new kids in town, she knew the best way for her to help them is to encourage her favourite acts to keep going.
