The band that inspired Stevie Nicks to greatness: “I was the biggest fan”
We see a lot of impassioned debate these days about what it means to be a good songwriter, forgetting that the one person who taught us all we’ll ever need to know is Stevie Nicks.
But even such greats learn their craft from somewhere, or at the very least, their excellence comes from closely observing and absorbing the traits and mannerisms of others. Which is precisely what Nicks took from her circle of favourites: Jackson Browne, CSN, and Joni Mitchell.
“What I learned from them [was] their phrasing,” Nicks said in 2011. In her view, they each “wrote poetry to music”, which, in the haze of endless music marathoning before she’d made it herself, taught her everything she’d ever need to know about how to be a storyteller. What Nicks probably hadn’t realised back then was that she’d wind up becoming a legend in her own right, even if she borrowed many of the same tricks that made people like Mitchell timeless figureheads of writing from the heart.
As Mitchell once put it, landing on artistic excellence is about writing “copiously” about your feelings whenever they come to you. You get it all down, in whatever mess it decides to bleed out of you, and worry about putting it all into song format later. When it came to writing with Lindsey Buckingham and then in Fleetwood Mac, Nicks already knew how to do this – understanding that a big hook is almost always better with words that actually sound good.
But while Mitchell might have taught her how to “fit thousands of words in every sentence if you sing it right,” one other act tapped her into the power of storytelling in a more mythological sense, and that was Linda Ronstadt’s fellow LA scene proteges, the Eagles. Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s intricate songwriting set a new standard for a broad range of stars in rock, but it also aligned with Nicks’ love for people who knew how to write catchy songs with poetic lyrics.
“When Lindsey and I broke up during Rumours, I started going out with Don Henley,” Nicks told Spin in 1997. “And you know, I was like the biggest Eagles fan of life.”
She continued, “Well, all those Eagles were an interesting group of guys. They were such good songwriters. I was blown away. I was totally awestruck. I mean, I was very, very famous, but it didn’t make me less awestruck with these men than anybody else. I was just as big a fan.”
Nicks was enamoured with Henley for quite some time. He wooed her by sending gifts to the studio where Fleetwood Mac were at, much to the dismay of an embittered Lindsey Buckingham. But Henley’s magnetism went beyond just physical attraction, as was the case for the rest of the Eagles. Their songwriting captured a specific moment in time, but it was also entirely timeless – a snapshot without the burden of dated ideals and phrases.
The same could be said for Nicks’ songwriting. She’s always had this knack for being relatable without diluting her own story. Which, as we know, is infinitely hard to come by in today’s world, where some of our so-called best poets are even struggling to find the balance between telling their story authentically while doing it at the same level Nicks has always operated. Which, in short, is about saying things that people haven’t said before, but organically and with such ease that people can still find themselves within the story.
