The song that made Stevie Nicks appreciate John Lennon and Paul McCartney
Stevie Nicks knows a thing or two about songwriting. She was a fundamental reason an ailing Fleetwood Mac could so quickly put the disappointment of the early 1970s behind them and return from the brink with 1975’s self-titled effort refreshed. This commenced the most fruitful chapter of their career, no matter the personal problems arising during it.
Writing classics such as ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ on the record, Nicks’ grasp of melody and penchant for poetry offered the band the shot in the arm they’d long needed alongside her boyfriend at the time, Lindsey Buckingham’s unique approach to the guitar and his own melodic potency.
The band knew exactly what they were getting when they brought Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on board. Mick Fleetwood, Fleetwood Mac’s leader and drummer, discovered the duo after hearing songs from their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks at Sound City Studios. The album’s engineer, Keith Olsen, played it for him, and Fleetwood was particularly impressed by Buckingham’s guitar work on ‘Frozen Love.’ Initially, Fleetwood intended to hire only Buckingham, but when the curly-haired guitarist made it clear he wouldn’t join without his girlfriend and musical partner, Stevie Nicks, the pair entered the fold together.
What’s interesting is that despite Buckingham and Nicks joining the band as a pair, the latter says she never really understood musical partnerships until years after Fleetwood Mac’s peak, when the dust had mostly settled on her and Buckingham’s tumultuous relationship, and she was deep into her solo career. It seems a strange comment, given she earned her break in the duo, but it perhaps says a lot about the dynamic between her and her ex during the creative process and outside of it.
According to Nicks, it wasn’t just musical partnerships she came to understand, but specifically that of The Beatles legends John Lennon and Paul McCarney, who filled in each other’s gaps creatively. This dawning realisation came when she made her 2011 solo album, In Your Dreams, with her dream partner coming in an unlikely source, ex-Eurythmics member Dave Stewart. He co-produced the record and collaborated on writing seven tracks with her, including ‘You May Be the One’.
“We wrote the song ‘You May Be the One’, and my eyes instantly opened and I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together – because they each had something the other didn’t have,” Nicks told Billboard. “And with Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I had thousands of pages of poetry – and I know six chords. It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds, and I immediately went, ‘Well, this is just great!'”
Nicks’ mind was opened to the power of writing concertedly as a duo after the record. That meant that when she re-connected with Stewart for an interview show with Jimmy Iovine, she decided on the spot that she would ask him to return for her next record, 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault. To kick off the process, she gave him a book of poetry that had been pulled together by her best friend from her journals over the previous decade, featuring 40 poems. While she would never usually do that, she knew Stewart would turn the words into musical magic.
Lo and behold, on the first day working on the record, he provided direction into what became one of her most personal releases to date.
