“I don’t know what would have happened?”: The relationship that turned Stevie Nicks into a songwriter
Where would art be without pain? It’s one of the cruellest facts that for us to appreciate beauty, we must also appreciate the ugliness in life. How would we ever get genres like the blues without suffering, and people uniting in a bid to escape said pain? Moving forward, how do we get gorgeous love songs without the threat of impending heartbreak? It’s one of the cruellest contradictions that the good cannot exist without the bad, and that’s something that is reflected in a lot of the works of Stevie Nicks.
Stevie Nicks is most famous for her solo career and the time that she spent in the band Fleetwood Mac. The latter was a complicated affair, where love, sex, drugs and creative differences all came together to lead to some of the greatest music in rock and one of the messiest break-ups of all time as well.
A lot of the songs that Stevie Nicks ended up writing were the result of the messy break-up that she went through with Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham himself admitted that a lot of the songs the band ended up writing were the result of the romantic dynamics within the group. These themes were unavoidable.
“Whatever was going in the band, specifically between the two couples, very much informed the material, and I think that was a very great appeal of the album,” he said, “If you look at the success that the album enjoyed, I think it goes a little bit beyond the music itself.”
Buckingham wasn’t the first relationship that Nicks wrote about, though. The moment she knew she was going to be a songwriter was when she received her first guitar and decided to write a song about a recent heartbreak. Nicks had always had a talent for channelling her emotions, no matter how difficult it may be, in a bid to create great music that not only reflected how she was feeling but was also there for other people to connect with. When is love more complicated than when you’re 16 years old? And yet, despite that complication, Nicks still managed to make a great song about it.
“The day before my 16th birthday, I got my guitar. And on my birthday, then I wrote a song about my first love affair,” she recalled, “It was a relationship at 15-and-a-half, where I was absolutely crazy about this guy. And he broke up with me. Thank God he broke up with me, because if he hadn’t… I wouldn’t have been spurred on to write that song.”
She continued, saying that the moment she finished her first song, it was clear she was going to become a professional songwriter. “I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t have been for that,” she said, “And when that song was done, I knew that I was going to be a songwriter. And I think my mom and dad knew it too.” Since then, she has perfected the art of songwriting and managed to use pain as fuel for great art ever since.
