The song Stevie Nicks hoped was written about her: “Even though I didn’t know him”
For musicians who find their footing as part of a broader circle or movement, having songs written about them sometimes feels inevitable. This is especially true for those who enter romantic entanglements with others in the scene, their stories becoming intertwined in ways that plant seeds for unknowing inspiration, whether these hues eventually become brightened by promise or tainted by breakups. Stevie Nicks perhaps knows this better than anybody.
From day one, Nicks’ story was defined by romance, not necessarily the traditional kind between two people, though she did rise to fame alongside her then-love, Lindsey Buckingham, but the kind that finds beauty in the mundane. Nicks always had a unique way of seeing the world, assigning poetic meaning to moments others would likely dismiss as ordinary.
When love and romance are seen in ways that flourish with new blooms of colours and feelings, as Nicks often channelled, this also establishes the basis for timeless art, the kind less rooted in specific tales and stories and more far-reaching in a transcendent sense. As a result, Nicks became the ultimate purveyor of romance, the leader of the very art itself, with songs as infinitely endearing as life’s greatest love stories.
However, as with most legendary figures, Nicks learned from absorbing others, carefully curating her wonderfully romantic world, the beauty and all its fractures, from the sounds and words of others. While the stories she sang about would become her own, even when they felt more overtly braided with the experiences and perils of others, many of these initial ideas of love came from one other virtuosic singer.
In Nicks’ world, Jackson Browne has always been a crucial figure, not just in terms of his songwriting and sonic charm but also in the way he frames romance as something that can be one of the most beautiful experiences in the world, especially when it’s fragile or fleeting. From Browne, Nicks learned the principles of channelling such a notion into the art of song, once telling Forbes, “From Jackson, I learned about writing love songs.”
While there are many songs Nicks holds dear, there is one in particular that she considers a favourite: Browne’s 1980 classic ‘That Girl Could Sing’. The song itself expresses the simple feeling of gratitude and appreciation for someone who was there for Browne when he needed it the most, with lyrics like, “She was a friend to me when I needed one, wasn’t for her I don’t know what I’d done,” set against a heady piano progression that feels both uplifting and weighted.
Discussing Browne and the track with Forbes, Nicks described the track as “one of [her] favourite songs” and said she wished she had inspired it, even though she knows she couldn’t have. “I always wanted to think that, even though I didn’t know Jackson Browne at that point, that he wrote that about me,” she said, adding, “Because, ‘Oh, I’m such a cool presence.'”
She also praised his songwriting, adding, “When you take, ‘She was a friend to me when I needed.’ And you remember those sentences and even the melody of those sentences.” Given Nicks’ penchant for poetic lyricism and the melodic enhancement of her own words, it’s no surprise she would find herself endeared to a song like ‘That Girl Could Sing’, with all its passion for someone who changed everything.
