The Beatles track Stevie Nicks saluted as “the perfect song”
Stevie Nicks has already written beyond her fair share of classic songs. Combing through her back catalogue, it’s easy to see a picture whenever delving into Nicks’s masterpieces, like the woman talking about the fleeting nature of time on ‘Landslide’ or the touching tribute that she made to her family members on ‘Edge of Seventeen’. Then again, Nicks has always been reverent towards the talent that came before.
Long before she made a dime in Fleetwood Mac, Nicks was still a child of her influences, moving in with Lindsey Buckingham when making her debut album after moving to California. Although she made ends meet by being a housekeeper to her producer when making Buckingham Nicks, Nicks always had her music to fall back on.
When discussing some of her greatest influences, the singer has always held The Beatles in high regard. As she first started to hash out her own melodies for songs, the singer thought that what The Beatles created on their albums wasn’t too far out of her reach, telling Rolling Stone: “I was first starting to play the guitar, but I already knew I was going to be a songwriter. I would sit on my bed and learn all these songs – not the incredible chords they used, but I could get through them.”
Of all the songs Nicks stumbled her way through, ‘Yesterday’ always had a special place in her heart. Although The Beatles’ ballad precedes the era when they started to become their more experimental selves, Paul McCartney’s ode to a love lost has been celebrated worldwide and is one of the most covered songs in music history. Whereas most people can see themselves in McCartney’s pathos, Nicks sees the genuine heartbreak behind the melody.
When speaking about the song, Nicks thought McCartney predicted what was going to happen to him later down the line with his wife Linda, remarking, “I think ‘Yesterday’ was very much a premonition of Paul of what was to come with Linda – finding his one great love, and then what it was to lose her. It’s the perfect song.”
For Nicks, ‘Yesterday’ wasn’t just another wistful tune; it was a proper lesson in how to break hearts without even raising your voice. No big production, no bells and whistles, just a simple melody and a load of bare feeling. She clocked early on that the most powerful songs often came in quietly, the kind that sneak into your chest and leave you blinking at the ceiling. That kind of subtle devastation clearly stuck with her. It’s all over her own work, too, always pulling at emotions without giving the full story away. That’s the mark of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Informed by the loss of his mother at an early age, ‘Yesterday’ also stands as one of the few Beatles songs to feature only Paul McCartney. While the band originally had plans to make a full arrangement out of the tune, it wasn’t until the string quartet was added that it started to assume its classic form.
As the ’70s wore on, Nicks found herself in the same position as the Fab Four, riding high with Fleetwood Mac off the back of the album Rumours. While the sessions behind her landmark album were fairly volatile, she did have a silver lining when that chaos turned into gold, putting her in the same league as other classic songwriters from the era, like Tom Petty.
Looking back on how she wrote songs, Nicks still feels like the mid-period of The Beatles was informative for her songwriting, saying, “These guys truly wrote about the intricacies of relationships. It was going deeper, and that’s what we were surprised by.” Thanks to The Beatles, rock and roll was getting more in-depth by the day, and it took someone like Nicks to go that one step further.
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