The 1974 song that never failed to make Stevie Nicks cry: “That would just kill me”
Stevie Nicks didn’t want to take an ounce of her fame for granted when she first joined Fleetwood Mac.
She knew that she and Lindsey Buckingham had struck gold when working with their bandmates, and when looking at all of the accolades that they have accumulated over the years, they didn’t get there without going through some of the greatest emotional highs and lows as well. But even if they operated like a musical soap opera in lots of ways, Nicks felt that some songs stuck with her for painting a moment in time better than anything that she would ever write.
But when you look at Nicks’s songs, not all of them are meant to be pop masterpieces like Buckingham’s were. Her partner was always used to taking his cues from the biggest names in rock and roll, like Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, and while he could spend hours trying to get the sound that he wanted, Nicks knew that nothing could compare to songs that captured a feeling. Those tunes are like portals to another dimension, and that can be as raw as you want them to be whenever she sings them.
She doesn’t necessarily have to have the same relationship with Buckingham now as she did when she was making Rumours, but you can still hear the vitriol in her voice when she sings tunes like ‘Silver Springs’. A lot of her tunes on the record were about her taking the dignified approach and wishing her other half peace, but when looking at this one tune, every line feels like it’s supposed to be cutting through Buckingham’s soul as they’re singing.
Then again, not all of those times were absolutely terrible, either. There was so much hope that was going into them joining Fleetwood Mac, and it’s not like Nicks and Buckingham didn’t have some fun times on their own. Buckingham Nicks wasn’t going to set the world on fire or anything, but when you listen to their one album, you can hear all of the greatness that they would soon be achieving on ‘Crying in the Night’.
Right as they joined the band, though, Nicks could tell that things were changing. It was going to be a completely different dynamic when they had more people in their group, and even if she had Christine McVie to help balance things out beside her, she couldn’t help but think about their times barely scraping by when she threw on albums like Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell. That was the era when everything felt possible, and ‘Same Situation’ was almost a warning for her about things that were going to change.
Mitchell was always one of Nicks’s greatest inspirations, but she also admitted that she could barely get through that song without getting emotional, saying, “She was talking about what it was like to be very famous and to be a woman living in a man’s world. Even though Buckingham Nicks had tanked, I knew that we were going to be very famous, very rich, and it was like a great old premonition just being laid out in front of me. There is a song on it called ‘Same Situation’ and that song just would kill me when I’d hear it. Because I knew it was coming.”
It was bound to be a little bit scary for Nicks to make that jump, but she wasn’t about to back down, either. She had been making some of the best music that she could during that time, and she was going to do everything in her power to make sure that she could hang with the rest of her peers, whether that was delivering songs like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ in the studio or transforming ‘Rhiannon’ into a completely different animal whenever they played live.
Mitchell wasn’t writing ‘Same Situation’ specifically for Nicks by any stretch, but anyone who was looking to break into the industry had a better idea of what they were getting into when listening to her sing. Her voice could be a calming presence for nearly anyone, but Mitchell was never going to sugarcoat her music. She needed to be honest with her fanbase, and that meant telling everyone about her own experiences and making them figure things out for themselves when they made their own records.
