Stevie Nicks’ favourite track to sing live: “It’s the song that I love”
Fleetwood Mac vocalist Stevie Nicks is the breed of performer who can make the stage look like her bedroom. She’s a natural entertainer who could knock the socks off of Gandhi and haunt an empty house. Perfectly matching silken ethereality with brazen power, her purr is a unique force to behold. Perhaps that’s because of its sincerity, borne as it is from a spiritual will to extoll some exultation from the spotlight.
Nicks was always bound to be a star. Standing in front of a sold-out arena is her most comfortable environment, and it feels more homely than home. When she received a guitar for her 16th birthday, she quickly attended to her soul-pouring duties, writing a song called ‘I’ve Love and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad but not Blue’, which began her journey.
At the time, Nicks had yet to refine her skills, but a first attempt signalled her innate talent for songwriting and confirmed the path she would follow. While she was yet to conquer her pursuit of the perfect song, it was evident from this moment that one day, she’d achieve the feat. “On my birthday, I wrote a song about my first love affair,” Nicks recalled of her first song. “It was a relationship at 15-and-a-half where I was absolutely crazy about this guy.”
While most would scribble something in the back of a jotter, Nicks turned to music, and this is how she’s continued to react to any adversity that comes away. She later reflected on the seismic moment when she first used the pen as a coping mechanism: “Thank God he broke up with me because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been spurred on to write that song,” she added. “Because when that song was done, I knew I was going to be a songwriter.” Proving a point usually forgotten: How glad we often are that life didn’t work out how we once thought we wanted it to.
Naturally, the melodramatic affair was pretty much fiction, but Nicks discovered it didn’t seem that way in song. “I realised right away that I could write songs because I could have experiences without even having them, by just singing about them,” she recalled. With that, a love of performing came to the fore.
Shortly afterwards, she joined her first band while attending Arcadia High School in California. Thereafter she moved onto Menlo Atherton High School as a senior and met Lindsey Buckingham at a Young Life social event. He was playing ‘California Dreamin” and she provided sweet harmonies. The rest, as they say, is ancient history and Nicks has been extolling heartbreak and exultation from it ever since.
Like any other artist, Nicks enjoys performing certain songs live more than others. Tracks can take on a whole new life when aired in front of an audience, especially when they are lesser-known creations. For that reason, her favourite track to sing isn’t ‘Dreams’ or ‘Edge of Seventeen‘, but a rarity that took her more than 35 years to perform for the first time.
As she said when discussing her album 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, which saw her revisit unreleased demos, “The song ‘If You Were My Love’ is a ballad that I love to sing so much, and I wanted to make sure that it was perfect. It’s the song that I love to sing most on stage with the girls.”
The song dates back to the Tusk era of Fleetwood Mac, but it never seemed to find its way onto a record. Nicks demoed it for subsequent solo records, but it just couldn’t quite find a slot. Nevertheless, Nicks couldn’t shift it from her psyche simply because she loved singing it so much, and it’s easy to see why. It is a ditty with enough depth to grace any stage. Fortunately, Nicks has now sent it soaring under the spotlight plentiful times.
Eventually, the song received an official release on 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, which allowed Nicks an opportunity to share a series of rarities on one compilation. Although in recent years, it has again disappeared from her setlist, ‘If You Were My Love’ was a staple on her world tour in 2016 and 2017 despite being far from a fan favourite.
