Stevie Nicks on Burt Bacharach’s vocal issues: “You need to have somebody to help”
The history of the pop charts isn’t always concerned with the most experienced musicians in the world. Not everyone who has a hit necessarily needs to be one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived, and some of the best songs to come out of the modern age have been focused on someone taking only a few basic chords and turning them into something special with the right melody behind them. Although Stevie Nicks may be the complete package when it comes to a seasoned veteran of songwriting, she admitted that even the professionals don’t have the best track record behind the microphone.
Granted, was rock and roll ever about having clean vocals all the time? This is the same genre that gave Dave Clark Five a pass back in the day and somehow gave Screaming Lord Sutch a solo career, so while someone like Freddie Mercury was a fantastic singer, those were the exceptions to the rule.
And while Nicks didn’t have the same proper vocal technique that you’d expect out of an opera singer, her smokey voice was perfect for every song she sang. She was always in tune with something a bit more ominous than the traditional rootsy rock song, and when she sang tracks like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Sara‘, you could tell that she was pulling something out of her subconscious half the time she was singing, almost like she needed to translate every bit of emotion in her heart onto the final take.
While Nicks let her poetry do the talking half the time, other songwriters were cut out to be kings of melody above everything else. Fleetwood Mac had already been born in a world that Gerry Goffin and Carole King helped create with the pop chart model, but whereas they could write R&B masterpieces all day, there was always something a bit different in the way Burt Bacharach constructed his tunes.
Not every one of his tracks was meant to be the most grandiose piece in the world, but from the way he wrote melodies to the sophisticated chords he picked, Bacharach was the person who could take out a piece of your heart and show it to you over the course of three minutes. Even if he did have a partner in Hal David, a song like ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’ only works when it has that laid-back foundation behind it.
Even though Nicks had her own partner to bounce ideas off of in Lindsey Buckingham during Fleetwood Mac’s tenure, she knew that it was for the best that Bacharach gave his tunes away, saying, “Burt can’t sing. But boy, let an incredible bunch of musicians at his songs and then it’s amazing. For songwriters, you need to have somebody to help you with the work.”
It’s not like Nicks doesn’t have a point, either. Bacharach could have spent his time working on his own voice and building himself up as one of the most showstopping performers of all time, but giving his songs to people like Dionne Warwick or Aretha Franklin was like strapping a jet engine to every one of his tunes.
Some people might work better as that sort of working musician, but Nicks was never that kind of composer. Everything that she made was an extension of her soul, and even if she could collaborate well with the rest of Fleetwood Mac, she knew that she had something special whenever she got behind the microphone to sing her own tunes.
