The one artist Stevie Nicks will always regret not meeting: “I missed out”
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Stevie Nicks was the star. From the moment she first stepped onto the stage with Fleetwood Mac, the music world seemed to fall, awed, at her feet. She seemed to have it all – the band, the solo project, the respect and her pick of friends and collaborators. But when she looks back at her career, there’s one figure she’s always regretted not using her power to seek out.
It’s strange—we don’t often think about these things. In the cultural eye, collaborations seem to happen as a natural coming together of two musical talents. Unless the backstory is particularly thrilling, people rarely care about the specifics of how and when two artists first met—whether they casually grabbed a drink and built a peer-friendly relationship or even a genuine friendship. Sometimes, though, it was purely business. In our rose-tinted reflections on history’s greatest duets, it’s easy to forget that, in some cases, the artists probably barely knew each other. They just wanted a big name on their album, so they made a call and had a fellow star pop into the studio.
But we also rarely think about the moments when world-famous stars become mere fans, just like the rest of us. To make music, you first have to love music, so it’s no surprise that even the biggest artists are also devoted fans with their own idols. If they’re lucky, sometimes they get to meet them—and even earn their respect. Stevie Nicks certainly had the power to make that happen, but in this case, she didn’t.
“I don’t even know that I ever met David Bowie,” Nicks told Dazed in 2020. Sitting on two different sides of the rock coin, Bowie as an art-rock master and Nicks as a pure rock and roll, it’s easy to forget that they shared a timeline. Both were at the top of their game at the same time, so any coming together would have been huge. But still, it never came to be.
“Had I ever met him, I probably would have said the first thing I usually say whenever I meet somebody who is one of my heroes: ‘Maybe we could get together and work on a song or something?’” she said. For someone as musically driven as Nicks, who clearly gets a lot out of being surrounded by other talented artists, reflected beautifully in her lifetime of friendships and partners, asking to collaborate with someone was the deepest way she could express a desire to get to know them.
“That’s usually my first line because that’s all I really want from all these people, to be in their presence and study what they do,” she explained. As she, and especially her bandmate Christine McVie, were key fans of Bowie’s work, it would have been a dream to get to witness him in action, but she sadly admitted, “I missed out on that. I loved a lot of his songs.”
It’s one of those regrets that haunts her. “You look back on your life and think, ‘Why didn’t I get on an airplane and go see David Bowie? Why didn’t I get on an airplane and go see a lot of people that I’ll never get to meet now?’” she said. But really, Nicks has done enough incredible things and met enough incredible people to be certain she’s lived an incredible life. Yet still, the missed chance stings as her love for Bowie runs deep, calling him “a great singer-songwriter. He was also a performance artist; he had a lot of talent and in a lot of different ways. He was a special guy. Really special.”
