Stevie Nicks’ favourite albums of all time: “I was the star”
“We all really basically have a lot of magic … it’s only those of us that choose to accept it that really understand it.” – Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac.
The whole world seemed to swoon for Stevie Nicks the second she walked out onto a stage with Fleetwood Mac. She captivated us with her candle-lit vocals, the locks of a lion sponsored by L’Oreal, and a mystically endearing personality.
The singer, famed for her leading role in the stadium-sized success of Fleetwood Mac as well as her stunning solo career, has always remained one of those rare rock and roll icons who feel otherworldly. The sort you couldn’t possibly imagine selling insurance or in any line of work away from pop culture’s spotlight, for that matter.
Her status as one of only 28 double Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees adds contemporary gravitas to that mystique, but it’s her command of poetry and music entwined that really elevates Nicks onto a new level of musical pedestal. With a wistfulness, she can make Maddison Square Gardens feel like a living room in a haunted house, and with great bravura, she could also knock the socks off of Gandhi.
Like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, John Lennon and Joni Mitchell before her, Nicks has always managed to possess a kind of ethereal luminescence. It’s a feeling that allows her to float across genre, subject and sound with impressive ease and consummate creativity. It’s also something that has allowed her to become an almost unattainable character in music. It’s a character that she has often called Rhiannon, a sort of Celtic goddess.
The Fleetwood Mac singer guaranteed her ascension into the Mount Olympus of rock a long, long time ago, but the ‘Dreams’ chanter is still gaining new fans with every chance listening on the radio or your latest streaming platform shuffle. That’s because to hear the personal and pivotal ‘Landslide’ just once is to fall for Stevie Nicks and her mesmerising vocal.
This almost mythic quality to both her rock persona and her singing voice has left fans, like us, hungry for insights into Nicks as a person. In her own cryptic way, she has always been willing to reveal these insights, and we can certainly glean a lot from the records that she cites as her firm four favourites.
We’ve looked before at the singer’s favourite books and her ability to transform her love of literature into textured music and authentic lyrics. But now we’re happy to bring you this 2011 interview with The Guardian where Nick details the songs and albums which soundtracked her early life, all wrapped up in a playlist to boot.
At the start of her musical journey lies the 1967 Buffalo Springfield hit ‘Rock and Roll Woman’: “Hearing this for the first time was like seeing the future. [Sings] ‘And she’s coming, singing soft and low…’ When I heard the lyrics, I thought: that’s me! They probably wrote it about Janis Joplin or someone like that but I was convinced it was about me.”
Having moved to the bustling city of San Francisco, the birthplace of counterculture rock in her last year of high school, Nicks would be dumped in the middle of the notorious Summer of Love when 100,000 people would descend on the Haight-Astbury neighbourhood. “By 1968 I was in a band with Lindsey [Buckingham]. His family lived in the same gated community as us, and we would practise at his house. My mum and dad liked him,” Nicks shares.
But the two kids at the core of this tale wanted to escape the confines of their cosy upbringing, and Buffalo Springfield seemed to forecast that for them. You can’t hear a line like, “There’s something happening here” and not want to find out what that means as a teenager. So, Nicks and her new soulmate played it to death, formulating an understanding of the mystic nature of music in the process.
The next selection is a pivotal record for all those fans of Stevie Nicks’s work in Fleetwood Mac. Nicks’ picks Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled 1969 record and says it is the “album that taught me how to sing harmony.” Such a vital column of Fleetwood Mac’s legend would not have been possible with Crosby, Stills and Nash.
She explains, “I spent a whole summer singing along to this record. I loved the harmonies, and learned to sing all three of the parts. I knew that I wanted to be in a band with the same kind of harmonies.” This goes a long way to illuminating how Nicks wouldd much rather be part of a mystic unit than a solo star. It was the power of art that enticed her rather than its more material appeals.
This abided by Nicks as she tried to ‘make it’, and even when she ‘made it’, the music that moved her back in the day still proved pivotal. Having been involved in the music business since she was a senior in high school Nick has performed a lot in her career but there’s still one song she puts on before she goes out on stage, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blonde in the Bleachers’.
As Nicks explains, the track is “about a girl who [sings] tapes her regrets to the microphone stand, she says ‘you can’t hold the hand of a rock’n’roll man for very long’. I never saw myself as the girl in the song – I identified with the rock’n’roll star.” The ‘Rhiannon’ singer continues.
Revealing that her nature was never likely to settle, she adds, “I was never gonna be the groupie. I was the star, I was sure of that. I listen to that song to this day.”
One album has a more textured set of emotions to accompany it; the LP Nicks picks acts as a reminder of when she was “down and out in Los Angeles”; she selects Court And Spark by Joni Mitchell. The 1974 record represents a troubling time for the singer, a moment when her musical path was littered with obstacles both professional and personal: “Lindsey and I were coming to the end of our relationship, and I’d met someone else.”
The album was a stark reminder to Nicks that she was not achieving her dream of becoming a pop star, often ruminating on whether to keep going at all. She told Gareth Grundy: “It was the only time I ever felt music might not work out. I talked to my parents about going back to school, because I was tired of being a cleaning lady, a waitress and a rock’n’roll star at the same time. We were really poor.”
It’s this precipice moment that Nicks reflects on solemnly in ‘Ladslide’. However, things would soon look up as “by the end of that year Mick Fleetwood had asked us to join Fleetwood Mac, sight unseen. Keith Olsen had played him Buckingham Nicks and told him Lindsey and I came as a pair“. The journey to stardom had begun, and from it, she moved through an illustrious career that serves as a golden example of the rock and roll lifestyle – both good and bad.
It’s the latter that has kept her tethered to the blues side of music, too. So, the last record to be discussed on the list is John Mayer’s 2009 LP Battle Studies, which after a recording mishap that meant Nicks could have a Hawaiian holiday, soon became the album that reminds her of friends.
As she explains, “So me and four of my friends went on holiday, drove over the mountains and listened to this record all the time. I don’t listen to other music when I’m actually writing as I don’t like to be influenced by other things. You don’t want to end up rewriting something that’s already been written.”
But this almost didn’t feel written at all, more akin to an incidental soundtrack to the sort of escape that Nicks had been waiting a lifetime to revel in. Once more, it was an album that held the sort of mythical, beyond music power that she has always hungered for in both her own output, and that of her peers, too.
There you have it some of Stevie Nicks’ most treasured music altogether in one place and even fully laid out in the playlist below. Enjoy.
Stevie Nicks’ favourite records:
- Buffalo Springfield Again – Buffalo Springfield
- Crosby, Stills & Nash – Crosby, Stills & Nash
- Court and Spark – Joni Mitchell
- Battle Studies – John Mayer
