The classic Fleetwood Mac song Stevie Nicks wrote in five minutes: “The best thing I can do”
Before joining Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks would still have been considered young in almost any other walk of life. However, the music industry is a cruel business that rarely gives people a second chance. Instead, the machine never stops turning and finding a new star to pluck from obscurity into the lights.
While Nicks wasn’t a widely known figure before joining Fleetwood Mac, she felt her shot at becoming a superstar musician had passed her by and been wasted. She’d already released a major label album with Lindsay Buckingham, which was a commercial failure, and although she was still only 27, Nicks believed it was now or never if she was to achieve her dream.
With the benefit of hindsight, the chance to become Fleetwood Mac’s vocalist appears to be a golden opportunity, but it was a very different proposition in reality. They were going through a transitional phase, and there were no guarantees that the new line-up, involving Buckingham and Nicks, would galvanise. Nevertheless, Nicks wasn’t taking any of it for granted and treated it as if her livelihood depended on it.
After being dropped by Polydor Records in 1974, Nicks’ parents were worried about her future. Her father told the singer she had six months to make it work or she’d have to return to the real world. During this time, when everything was up in the air, Nicks and Buckingham moved out to Aspen, Colorado, which proved to be the perfect antidote to the anxiety about her musical career. Her parents had offered to send her to college if she wanted to sacrifice her artistic ambitions in exchange for a normal life.
Speaking to VH1 Storytellers in 1998, Nicks recalled how that conversation with her parents stayed in her mind and led to her writing ‘Landslide’, which materialised in a matter of minutes. She explained: “The story of ‘Landslide’ everybody seems to think that I wrote this song about them. Everybody in my family, all my friends, everybody… and my Dad, my Dad did have something to do with it, but he absolutely thinks that he was the whole complete reason it was ever written.”
She continued: “I guess it was about September 1974, I was home at my Dad and Mom’s house in Phoenix, and my father said, ‘You know, I think that maybe… you really put a lot of time into this [her singing career], maybe you should give this six more months, and if you want to go back to school, we’ll pay for it and uh, basically you can do whatever you want, and we’ll pay for it’. I have wonderful parents, and I went, ‘Cool, I can do that.'”
After their conversation, she moved to Aspen, still thinking about her parents’ offer. Nicks believed a ticking time bomb was on her career, and suddenly, the lyrics spilt out of her within five minutes while she was experimenting on the guitar. Little did she know it, but that five-minute period would create one of her most defining artistic moments. She said in 1992 to In the Studio with Red Beard: “‘Landslide’ I wrote on the guitar, and it’s another one that I wrote in about five minutes. But see, when I’m really thinking about something. I mean when something’s really bothering me, again, the best thing that I can do is go to the music room, or to the office, where I can write.”
At the time of writing ‘Landslide’, Nicks had no vehicle to release the song after losing her record deal. Then, the call came from Mick Fleetwood to join Fleetwood Mac, and the song found a home on their self-titled 1975 album. It immediately proved her songwriting credentials to the rest of the band and was one of the three tracks she wrote for the LP. While it was shockingly never elected to be released as a single, it became an immovable part of the band’s setlist for decades to come and one of their most beloved creations.
