‘Crash Into Me’ – Dave Matthews Band

Okay, so you might need to bear with me on this one. While Dave Matthews Band have gained a reputation as the one band with the sleepy music and kickass live show, ‘Crash Into Me’ has occupied that weird space between being a genuine classic from the 1990s and the song that every frat bro plays on guitar to woo a lady at the end of the night. None of those qualifiers are exactly screaming ‘STEVIE NICKS’, but she turned it into something else entirely when she managed to get her voice around it.

Whereas Matthews’s voice is finely suited for this kind of tune, Nicks brings more sensuality to the whole thing. Most of her songs were never explicitly sexual, but there’s a far more romantic subtext than the kind of stoner voice that Matthews brought to the original version of the tune. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the original from a production perspective, but if Matthews knew the perfect arrangement, Nicks knew the best vocal presence that the song needed.

‘Insider’ – Tom Petty

Tom Petty always seemed to function as Nicks’s musical big brother in many respects. As much as she loved his music, she was always an honorary Heartbreaker in every sense of the word, to the point where her showing up at one of his concerts was almost proverbial. But before she was gifted ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, ‘Insider’ was the song she accidentally turned into her own when it came out on Hard Promises.

Despite Petty considering the tune one of his finest ballads, it’s hard to ignore Nicks’s soaring harmonies on the verses of the song. Petty is trying his best to sell the song with a good amount of grit to it, but as soon as Nicks adds her harmonies to the song, it’s the kind of duet that shows the tender side of what ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ was supposed to be. Her big hit was all about someone chastising their lover, but this is them contemplating their place in the relationship.

‘Edge of Midnight’ – Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus has never liked to stay too far away from rock and roll ever since she left the Disney Channel. Although there was a slim chance that anyone would take Hannah Montana seriously right out of the gate, her journey to become one of the most interesting presences in music has been a wild roller coaster ride to witness. And while Plastic Hearts had the makings of a classic Nicks-style album, it didn’t really come alive until Nicks gave her stamp of approval on the remix.

‘Midnight Sky’ already had a guitar riff similar to Nicks’s ‘Edge of Seventeen’, so having ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ come back for a cameo was almost too perfect to work. What’s even crazier is how well she fits in with Cyrus, almost like Nicks was duetting with a rocker from the 1970s that never truly broke through. She had already given her stamp of approval to many female artists before her, like Courtney Love and The Chicks, so this was a case of ‘Aunt Stevie’ working her magic once again.

‘Rock and Roll’ – Led Zeppelin

There’s no chance anyone could improve on what Led Zeppelin did on any of their songs. As much as they loved the idea of interpreting other people’s material, the magic between John Bonham and Jimmy Page, for example, would be impossible for anyone else to even attempt to pull off. But Nicks wasn’t looking to best Zeppelin when taking on ‘Rock and Roll’; she was simply reinterpreting it for a completely different audience.

Not many Nicks fans would be as ingrained in rock history as she was, but when she did her version of ‘Rock and Roll’, it’s far more ramshackle in the best way possible. She had become known for more glitzy production, so hearing her with this kind of backing band behind her was refreshing for anyone who wanted something edgier than The Other Side of the Mirror. Zeppelin’s version isn’t going anywhere, but Nicks was more than capable of holding her own next to the legends as well.

‘Just Like A Woman’ – Bob Dylan

It’s almost understood by any artist that covering Bob Dylan feels like hallowed ground. No one should touch upon his immortal words unless they have an excellent idea, and unless their name is Jimi Hendrix, there’s hardly any reason to think it will be any better. But when Nicks actually managed to craft her own version of ‘Just Like A Woman’, it felt like she was completely reentering the tune for a new generation.

Dylan’s take on the tune may have already been given a lot of flak for sounding slightly misogynistic compared to his other work, but having it sung by someone like Nicks turns the entire subject on its head. While she does attempt to put some of that nasally Dylan cadence into her voice, Nicks sounds like she’s talking about a woman she’s seeing who is dealing with her own set of demons, which might have been all too real given her drug problems during the making of the record. A line like ‘She breaks just like a little girl’ might seem too over-the-top, but it only serves to show her frail state of mind.