Listen to Stevie Nicks’ isolated vocals for ‘Gold and Braid’
Arguably the most important female voice in rock history, Stevie Nicks has left a legacy to be marvelled at. She first met her musical and romantic partner Lindsey Buckingham during her senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California. She was out one night at the Young Life Club where she watched Buckingham playing a cover of Barry McGuire’s ‘California Dreamin’’ and she decided to join him in harmony. This romantic image of the pair would mark the beginning of one of the most successful, yet notoriously tempestuous, musical relationships of all time.
Nicks and Buckingham left home to study at San José State University but both would subsequently drop out to follow their passion for music with their humble beginnings in the psychedelic rock band Fritz. When Fritz broke up in 1972 Buckingham and Nicks tried their luck as a duo and released the album, Buckingham Nicks, released in 1973, which received less commercial attention and praise than it perhaps deserved. During this period, Nicks and Buckingham lived at producer Keith Olsen’s house where Nicks would clean the house to earn her pocket money.
In late 1972, Lindsey Buckingham had left for a job playing the guitar with the Everly Brothers on tour. While Buckingham was away, Nicks took to her notepad and wrote two of her greatest songs in ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’. The latter was written about her relationship with Buckingham which was, at the time, in one of the first of many downward spirals.
In 1974, Olsen showed Mick Fleetwood, the drummer of Fleetwood Mac, some of Nicks and Buckingham’s material and, upon hearing it, Mick invited Buckingham into the band as they were in need of a guitarist of his calibre. Buckingham stalled proceedings insisting that he comes only as a package deal with Nicks; Mick accepted agreeing that another singer and songwriter could do the band a world of good too. As it transpired, Mick couldn’t have made a better decision. 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’.
By 1976, Nicks and Buckingham were at the highest heights of their musical careers but their personal relationship had fallen on sour times. Just about managing to hold their structure, the band pushed on amid the strain within the band and recorded Rumours which was to become a landmark album and one of the best selling of all time.
Part of the magic formula behind Fleetwood Mac’s incredible song-writing during their time in the spotlight in the late ‘70s was the tensile relationships between the band members as their cocaine-fuelled fame began to get out of hand; a love affair between Nicks and the still-married Mick Fleetwood in 1977 only served to sprinkle petrol on the fire. Some of the greatest songs of all time have come from origins of raw, powerful feeling and more often and not for Nicks and Buckingham, these were words with a real sting in their tail.
A number of Nicks’ greatest tracks were written about her feelings toward her on-off lover Buckingham. Among her solo songs written in the early 1980s was ‘Gold and Braid’, which she described: “’Gold and Braid’ (…) [is] about Lindsey wanting more from me in our relationship. But wanting to know everything about someone, which goes hand in hand with being in love, was never something I’ve ever wanted to share with anybody. Professionally, everybody always wanted me to be their idea of what I should be. I’d flat-out look at people and say, ‘You know I’m not gonna do what you want, so why do you bother?’”
The isolated vocals from ‘Gold and Braid’ below show both the staggering songwriting and vocal talents Nicks possesses. It really isn’t a surprise that she has become the first female artist to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, both as a solo artist and with Fleetwood Mac.
