The one musician who was out of Stevie Nicks’ league: “I couldn’t if i wanted to”
The entire musical journey of Stevie Nicks was never about being the greatest musician in the world.
Anyone can spend their time trying to excel at their instrument until they reach perfection, but it takes a true artist to be able to say something with only a handful of notes like Nicks could when working on Fleetwood Mac classics. But for all of the great music she made with Lindsey Buckingham, she would always leave some of the most difficult songs to the true professionals of songwriting.
Then again, it’s not like there weren’t some fantastic moments on a lot of Nicks’s tracks. Her vocal range on ‘Gold Dust Woman’ is still one of the most haunting moments in their discography, and while ‘Edge of Seventeen’ is far from the most complicated song in the world to play on guitar, it takes a lot more strength than most people would imagine to get the kind of precision to play those notes with no breaks for minutes on end.
But if you were to put Nicks in front of a piano, she could normally be found playing the same few chords to get her tunes off the ground. Not everything needed to be that complicated to be classic for her, but when listening to some of the biggest names in her record collection, it wasn’t like she couldn’t respect the time and effort that her heroes put into every single masterpiece they made.
She already had time closely studying what The Beatles did when first working with Buckingham, but it was going to take something more than rock and roll tunes to hold her attention. Her idols were the ones that made you feel completely different while the music was playing, whether that was listening to Jimi Hendrix light hearts on fire with his guitar or Janis Joplin kicking everything into high gear the minute she started singing ‘Ball and Chain’.
Even by rock and roll standards, though, there was no way of matching what Joni Mitchell was doing. She was the mother of alternate tunings in many respects, and while it’s one thing to make great tunes with a couple of chords, what Mitchell did on her later albums was about trying to find the beauty in playing some of the most complex chords ever created with some of her favourite jazz players by her side.
And while Nicks did have a massive love of albums like Ladies of the Canyon, she was quick to say that she was never going to be able to match what Mitchell did, saying, “I didn’t want to play music like her. I couldn’t if I’d wanted to–I can’t play the guitar worth shit, and Joni’s a great player. I just loved the way she was a very personal writer yet easy to relate to. She was doing what I wanted to do.”
That could be Nicks simply being humble, but it’s not like there wasn’t some truth to it as well. Most people would consider themselves lucky to do half of what Mitchell could on any of their albums, and while the harmonies might not have made that much sense when you first heard them, Court and Spark and Blue had that unspoken beauty that was nearly impossible to pin down.
While a lot of the delicate pieces of Mitchell’s work can be found in a lot of Nicks’s writing, it was never about trying to be her successor by any means. Mitchell was already her own unique entity, and if she taught Nicks anything, it was to carve out her own identity rather than latch onto her influences too hard.
