The 1977 song Stevie Nicks wanted to sing forever: “Probably my favourite”
Stevie Nicks needed to embody every single song before she even thought about singing it.
Not everyone in Fleetwood Mac approached songwriting in the exact same way, but when you look at how Nicks was sculpting her masterpieces, she wasn’t going to lend her voice to something that didn’t have any passion behind it. She had already begrudgingly worked her way through songs that she detested, but if she was making her own tunes, she was going to make sure that it couldn’t have been any more perfect if she tried.
Then again, her definition of ‘perfection’ was a lot different from what Lindsey Buckingham thought when he first joined the band. Despite all of them wanting to make the best music they could, the guitarist wasn’t afraid to push his bandmates to the brink to get the sound that he wanted, but Nicks was going after capturing a certain feeling whenever she made a record. Something might sound a bit off on one of her tracks, but that didn’t matter as long as it sounded honest.
That’s half the reason why a song like ‘Landslide’ works so well. There’s virtually nothing to the song when you hear it in the right context, but when Nicks first opens her mouth to sing, there’s nothing in the world stopping her from telling her story. The same applies to her singing ‘Rhiannon’, but when everyone got their hearts broken on Rumours, Nicks was trying her best to hold things together as best as she could.
‘Silver Springs’ was the song where she let out all of her anger and resentment, but ‘Dreams’ is a far more level-headed way of looking at her breakup with Buckingham. While the guitarist took the less-than-dignified approach by claiming that she wanted to shack up with anyone she saw, ‘Dreams’ was about being able to move on with their lives and letting the rain wash away all of the bullshit that existed between them.
Neither of them was going to give up the band, and looking at the reputation the song has now, she had clearly hit a nerve. There was no one else in the world who knew what it was like to be in her situation, but the feeling of wanting to move on and find a better emotional place is something that we all go through with the precious time that we have on this Earth.
And while Nicks claimed that all of her songs were like her children, she figured that ‘Dreams’ would be a permanent fixture of her setlist because of how much it meant to her, saying, “I would probably say that ‘Dreams’ is probably my favorite song. Cuz it’s the one that I always enjoy doing it on stage, no matter what you know. It’s the song that never gets kicked outta the set. I wrote ‘Dreams,’ Lindsey wrote ‘Go Your Own Way.’ That was our two different reactions to the same thing that had happened.”
Even though there are plenty across Rumours, the fact that ‘Dreams’ has endured more than, say, ‘Gold Dust Woman’ is more about the feeling that both songs evoke as well. No one was going to claim that they lived through the same kind of drug-induced fantasy that Nicks is talking about on her other classic from the record, but the key to what makes ‘Dreams’ such a great song is that it’s simple. All you need is that little musical heartbeat to keep things going, and whenever Nicks is singing the song today, it’s easier for her to put any adornment that she wants over the top of it.
So while her setlist is pretty much guaranteed to have a version of ‘Dreams’, it’s harder to pick between her own solo hits. They were all different looks into her musical psyche, but when it came to her work with the band, there was no way anything was going to eclipse this kind of musical heartache.
