The 1964 song that made Stevie Nicks realise she was going to be famous
All of your favourite musicians, including Stevie Nicks, started out as little-known dreamers attempting to write songs in their bedrooms.
One of the common pieces of advice you’ll hear from creatives around the globe is that if you want to start making something, the best thing you can do is just start. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the jump; instead, you should just start making whatever it was that you’re passionate about and fine-tune it along the way.
This is what happened with The Rolling Stones. They originally got their start playing covers of R&B artists, but their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, knew that if they were going to have any prolonged success, they needed to start writing originals. That was easier said than done, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were dragging their feet, so much so that their manager locked them away and forced them to get writing. The result? ‘As Tears Go By’.
“Suddenly, ‘Oh, we’re songwriters’, with the most totally anti-Stones sort of song you could think of at the time,” said Keith Richards, “While we’re trying to make a good version of [Muddy Waters’] ‘Still A Fool’. When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
Of course, not every band is going to write ‘As Tears Go By’ as their first ever single. The majority of your favourite artists never released the first track they ever wrote because it pales in comparison to what they eventually went on to make. However, while these first songs usually aren’t great, they do help cement the fact that the artist wants to make music, something that Stevie Knicks experienced in her career.
She went on to write some of the greatest songs of all time, such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘The Chain’, both of which are excellent listens regardless of when and where they come on. The first song she ever wrote, ‘I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost’ isn’t held up in the same regard, but it was the song that proved to Nicks that she was going to be a musician, and a famous one at that.
The turning point wasn’t the song itself, but how Nicks felt when she was writing it. She realised when putting the track together just how emotional it made her, and using music as this form of expression was something she had no intention of turning away from. It was an ode to the first person she ever loved, and when she initially performed it, she couldn’t help but cry.
“I think I absolutely knew I was gonna be famous. I knew from when I first wrote my first song about the first love of my life, and sat there on my bed and watched myself play it in the mirror with tears running down my face,” said Nicks, “It was my 16th birthday, my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do: write songs and sing them to people.”
Sometimes, that’s all that great artists need. It doesn’t need to be a great song, but a song that shows them they’re capable of greatness. If not for that first love and that first song, who knows, we might not have ever gotten Stevie Nicks.
