The artist Stevie Nicks called her “diving board” to songwriting
Unlike most of her peers, Stevie Nicks wasn’t entirely guided by what her parents were listening to.
Most musical legends started out that way – studying whatever they heard playing around the house as a young kid. Most of the time, this early exposure shaped their own sound, like how Linda Ronstadt once said she only ever aimed to make music that sounded like everything she’d already heard by the age of ten.
Nicks grew up with music all around her, but she already knew what she was drawn to. Much to her parents’ amazement, she carved out her own path, steering away from what seemed almost inevitable – a fondness for country. With a grandfather who was a country musician, it wouldn’t have been a huge shock if she’d followed in his footsteps. But she had other ideas.
But when it came to forming her own interests, it wasn’t really something she went for. Eventually, after doing what most children did during their first moments falling in love with music and enjoying whatever sounded the most fun, she began paying attention to those who were the real storytellers. Nicks shared a passion many did during the counterculture and the singer-songwriter boom, and truly learned the power of words.
Joni Mitchell was a seminal figure when it came to Nicks learning how to become a world-class storytelling poet. Mitchell was someone whose words fell out of her, earning her labels like “confessional”, when it was really far more complicated than that. Mitchell took uncertainty and intertwined it with personal musings, observations about the scene she was a part of, and what it was like navigating love and loss during such a pivotal movement in history.
Nicks learned how to write by paying attention to people like Mitchell, but she learned the power of feeling through melody, vocals, and arrangements by gravitating towards singers like Carole King, whose lyrics with Gerry Goffin stuck with her through most of her own hits later on. Interestingly, she only realised how deep this impact went when she heard ‘Dreams’ and saw the girl she used to be, listening to King and wondering if one day she’d follow in the same footsteps.
“I started singing when I was in fourth grade: R&B, all the Shirelles’ songs and the Supremes and the Shangri-Las,” Nicks told Rolling Stone when asked which female singers inspired her. “All those amazing songs Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote,” she went on.
“That was my diving board for singing as a little girl. My grandfather was a country singer, but I said, ‘No, I’m full-on Top 40. I’m not country.’ I’m dancing to all this crazy R&B music, singing, “Sugar pie, honey bunch,” and my parents are asking, ‘Where did she come from? She’s an alien!’
On how this came to the surface on ‘Dreams’, she said the first time she heard it, she thought, ‘There’s that little girl that was singing along to the Supremes.’ Funnily enough, she also said that becoming her favourites is a life-long process: “Carole and Gerry, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill — those are the songs that I learned to sing to. I wanted to be a part of that. I’m 70 now, so I’ve been working on this for like 60 years.”
It’s amazing now to think that Nicks is that exact figure for so many new generations of female musicians. She’s always humble about it, of course, even when she discusses how her journey to becoming a legend was pretty unique, having to advocate for herself among male musicians. But even still, that humility is also what feeds into her being so great. And why, whenever she looks back at those seminal influences, the spark is still there, still coming through even though she’s more than established her own footprint as one of the everlasting greats.
