Stevie Nicks’ favourite song by Eagles feels like a 1972 blueprint for her life
Alongside her former romantic and professional partner, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s to help re-establish the transatlantic group as a pop-rock sensation.
The talented pair first met during Nicks’ senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California. Nicks was out one night at the Young Life Club, where her eyes fell upon Buckingham, who was performing a cover of Barry McGuire’s ‘California Dreamin”. Nicks decided to join Buckingham in harmony, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Buckingham and Nicks left home to study at San José State University, but both subsequently dropped out in favour of a music career. The pair’s first musical exploit was with the psychedelic rock band Fritz. When the group disbanded in 1972, Buckingham and Nicks rolled the dice as a duo to release Buckingham Nicks, an album that received less commercial attention and praise than it perhaps deserved.
Although the record failed commercially, it established many of the musical ideas that would later make Fleetwood Mac a global phenomenon. Nicks’ mystical lyricism and Buckingham’s intricate guitar work were already fully formed, even if the wider public had yet to catch on.
In late 1972, Buckingham joined the Everly Brothers on tour to play the guitar. Meanwhile, Nicks took to her notepad and penned two of her most enduring classics, ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’. The latter was written about her relationship with Buckingham, which was, at the time, descending into the first of many subsequent troughs.
At that point in her life, Nicks was balancing ambition with uncertainty, trying to hold together both a creative partnership and a romantic relationship while living on the edge financially. In hindsight, it’s easy to understand why songs about mysterious women and emotional turbulence resonated so strongly with her.
In 1974, producer Keith Olsen introduced the pair to drummer Mick Fleetwood. Requiring a versatile guitarist, Fleetwood initially invited Buckingham to the band alone. Loyally, the loved-up Buckingham stalled the recruitment process, insisting that he would only join if his girlfriend could accompany him. Mick duly accepted, agreeing that another singer-songwriter would add a favourable dynamic to proceedings.
In 1975, the self-titled album Fleetwood Mac would become the band’s most commercially successful to date, bolstered by Nick’s songs’ Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’. Two years later, the band reached dizzier heights still with Rumours.
In 2011, Nicks was invited to join BBC Radio 2 for their popular ‘Tracks of My Years’ feature while promoting her album, In Your Dreams. Nicks picked out Eagles’ 1972 hit, ‘Witchy Woman’ for her introductory selection. She explained that the country-rock innovators had been a crucial influence on her and Buckingham during their formative years.
“The Eagles were famous before Lindsey, and I moved to Los Angeles,” Nicks said, introducing the song. “We drove to LA, and I remember listening to that song, thinking what a great song it was, and of course, I’m sure as all women my age did at that point, we were all hoping that we would actually be the witchy woman. Premonition-wise, I would come to know Don Henley quite well. In fact, I even do know who the actual witchy woman was; it was someone who became a very famous jeweller.”
“The Eagles were very inspirational to both Lindsey and I because we loved their singing, and we loved their ability to bridge country and rock and roll so beautifully,” she continued. “I thought ‘Witchy Woman’ was just the perfect mix of country and rock and roll. And so we were very inspired by that, Lindsey and I.”
The admiration clearly ran deeper than simple fandom. ‘Witchy Woman’ represented a template for the kind of atmosphere and storytelling Nicks would later bring into Fleetwood Mac, blending romance, danger and mythology into songs that felt both intimate and larger than life.
Listen to the Eagles’ classic ‘Witchy Woman’ below.
