The specific moment Stevie Nicks knew she would become a musician
Shakespeare once wrote, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”. For a lot of people, it’s one or the other. Perhaps they’re born talented but never breakthrough, or maybe they build slowly but surely over time, spending their life climbing with their greatness in tow. For some, greatness is thrust upon them when a spark of celebrity seems to hit them in an instant. For Stevie Nicks, it’s been all three, and she knows that.
The typical sob story speech or awards show acceptance usually goes something like, “I never thought this would happen to me” or “never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be here”. It’s usually humble, downplaying their huge status by acting like it’s all come as a total surprise. For a lot of artists, it probably did. Some find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly in the limelight when projects they’ve been chipping away at in the background suddenly get a spotlight on them or become overnight sensations without really trying or asking to be. Some genuinely don’t believe they’ll ever make it, so when they do, it’s a real shock.
But it wasn’t that way for Stevie Nicks. Instead, she always knew she’d make it. “I think I absolutely knew I was gonna be famous,” she told Interview Magazine plainly. It might come across as presumptuous or arrogant, but Nicks simply seemed to recognise the greatness within her from the very start and never seemed to doubt that it would lead her to be things.
However, her comfortable knowledge that she would be famous wasn’t born from a desperate desire like some reality TV contestant or string of one-hit-wonders who are simply clambering for their 15 minutes. Instead, it seemed to sit in her gut like a sense of total, assured self-confidence that spanned from her talent and her trust that her talent would always be noticed.
“I knew from when I first wrote my first song about the first love of my life, and sat there on my bed and watched myself play it in the mirror with tears running down my face,” she remembered. “It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song,” she continued. With a title that could easily have sat on a Fleetwood Mac album
Even with that first song, Nicks had managed to move herself to tears. Whether it was the feeling of catharsis it brought her or a beautiful moment of realising that she had a knack for articulating her innermost feelings, the result was a solid knowledge that this is what she would end up doing. “I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people,” she said.
She wasn’t the only one who noticed it either. From then on, the people around Nicks began to see that greatness, that spark, that talent. In high school, a group of other students asked her to join the band The Changing Times because they saw she had something special. She then met Lindsey Buckingham, and the two formed a romantic and musical partnership that would change the course of their lives. By the mid-1960s, Nicks was in Buckingham’s band, opening for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, still with the rightful sense that this is what she was born to do.
It was a talent so great that when she wanted to drop out of college to pursue music full-time, her father gave her his full blessing, which is a rare instance in an industry built on teenage rebellion and pissing off the parents.
But when seeing the artist that Nicks became and still is today, who could ever have denied her early hunch? Her teenage belief that she would be famous and would spend her life writing and singing songs came true, and came true on a scale that probably even she couldn’t have imagined, no matter how assured her self-confidence was.
