Heartfelt Hooks: Lorde’s favourite Fleetwood Mac song
It feels as though we’ve always had Lorde at the pulse of our pop music psyches, but in reality she broke through only a little over 10 years ago with her major hit ‘Royals’, and at that, she was just 16. Since then, she’s taken us through the magical journey of 2013’s Pure Heroin, 2017’s Melodrama – a masterpiece if ever you saw one – and 2021’s Solar Power, with her as yet unannounced but widely speculated fourth album being eagerly anticipated by fans and critics alike.
Lorde is a musical powerhouse who has established her genius so young, so inevitably, there must be past icons of the airwaves who have inspired her along the way.
Well, it’s true that the biggest stars tend to have the best taste, and Fleetwood Mac fans will be delighted to know that Lorde holds the band in the highest of esteem. Through a back catalogue that obviously includes the iconic 1977 album Rumours, it can be so hard to pick out just one tune from the London-bred rockstars, but Lorde has one clear favourite.
That would be the incomparable ‘Landslide’, the tear-jerking acoustic lullaby adored the world over. Like so many, Lorde relates to the song in a very personal connection to episodes throughout her life, saying that in the case of Fleetwood Mac’s entire body of works, “Every song had a place in my heart, in the fabric of my childhood and my family life.”
She’s totally right, and it’s exactly where the beauty of the hit, released in 1975, lies. The sentiment of the heartfelt hooks – “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?/ Can I handle the seasons of my life?” – undoubtedly touch the lives of everyone who hears them in different ways, but for Lorde, it must be particularly emotionally pertinent given the drastic manner in which her life was altered with the occurrence of fame and the element of youth she sacrificed for it.
The New Zealander’s relationship with the band is as clear as any fangirl’s, but it was only cemented further back in 2015 when she first got to see them live, reflecting afterwards on Instagram that it was the: “best concert of [her] life,” continuing that, “never before has a band given so much to me.” It’s high praise indeed, and undoubtedly an extremely popular view shared by millions of Fleetwood Mac fans that Lorde proudly sits at the heart of.
But in terms of frontwoman Stevie Nicks, Lorde feels there’s a whole different scale of energy she possesses. As part of the same post, she said: “Stevie’s voice was sharp and clear and full. How purely magical it was to see her in front of me, my crescent moon mother, in the flesh, all in black, her hair playing tricks with the light.”
Lorde would have been absolutely ecstatic then, when in later years she has been able to rub shoulders with the “crescent moon mother” and have her fangirling reciprocated, with Nicks gushing about how much she admires the ‘Green Light’ star and even saying she wants her to be part of the band. It’s an amazing turn of events for any huge fan, and the intersection of Lorde and Fleetwood Mac lovers have gone crazy for the crossover, but even more spellbinding is ’Landslide’’s ability to capture hearts and being people together as it has done for this stratospheric singer and so many others.
