The 2000s pop singer Stevie Nicks fell in love with: “She’s completely crazy”
The entire point of Stevie Nicks joining Fleetwood Mac wasn’t about her becoming one of the biggest singers in the world.
She knew that she and Lindsey Buckingham had something that no one else did, and when they got together with the rest of the band to jam for the first time, they could hear that there was much more potential for them to make some of the greatest rootsy music that anyone had ever heard. But Nicks was also a sucker for pop music, and all it takes is the right song for her to fall head over heels for a singer who seems to be doing everything right.
Then again, Nicks has become almost omnipresent in the lives of most pop singers. She wasn’t going with the traditional route for a rock and roll singer, but she wasn’t going to adopt the same kind of mentality that she saw in someone like Madonna. Her image was important, but she needed people to stick around for what she had to say, especially when she had tunes that hit like a sledgehammer, like ‘Silver Springs’.
And when looking through a lot of her best material, many of her songs usually come from a deeper place than the saccharine side of pop music. A lot of the biggest names in her record collection were singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, so when she was making her own comeback in the early 2000s, she was more than happy to sing those great songwriters coming out of the woodwork once again.
The grunge wave had long since faded, and hearing the country resurgence gave her a bit more hope for what the next generation had to offer. The Chicks had some of the finest country songs that anyone ever made during that time, but there were also the adult contemporary stations that were championing people who had a much different agenda whenever they wrote one of their tunes. Sheryl Crow had already been a friend of Nicks’s as far back as the 1990s, but Vanessa Carlton was one of the few pop stars of the time who seemed to be on a righteous path in her mind.
But when you think about it, Carlton wasn’t cut out to share the spotlight that every other 2000s singer was supposed to be. Any pop diva was usually expected to become the next Nelly Furtado or Britney Spears whenever they made a new record, and while ‘A Thousand Miles’ did fit in nicely with the other soft ballads of the time, Nicks respected Carlton a lot more for pulling back from the limelight half the time.
She knew that Carlton could be massive if she wanted to be, but she liked the idea of challenging what people told her to do, saying, “She’s my favorite and I just love her. She’s completely crazy and she’s completely modernist. She could care less about record companies or record deals or what people want. She’s all about writing exactly what she wants. She’s extreme and I just adore her because of that. I give her advice, she totally doesn’t take it. I tell her what I think, she listens and does the exact opposite thing. I love her for that, because she’s me in a lot of ways. I think she’s extremely talented and I love her voice.”
And that’s partly what Nicks was facing when she started her own solo career. There were plenty of people telling her how solo careers like hers usually play out, but she was determined to forge her own path, whether that meant straddling the line between her own stuff and Fleetwood Mac music or trying to touch on material that would have been a bit too risque for someone to try.
‘The Gold Dust Woman’ thrived on taking unconventional routes, and as long as there were people like Carlton willing to do the same thing, she knew that everything was right with the world. Because even if the world wasn’t going to hear another smash hit from her, it’s every artist’s job to forge their own path and not give a shit about what the rest of the world thinks about their new direction.
