The “proudest moment” of Stevie Nicks’ career
The idea of someone’s greatest achievement is difficult to quantify, with many disparate events of equal importance occurring over one’s lifetime. So how could anyone ever pick just one, let alone if you’re a superstar like Stevie Nicks?
I could spend the rest of this article pointing to moments in Stevie Nicks’ life that possibly warrant the ‘greatest achievement’ status. As a young woman, she managed to build a life for herself in music. She joined Fleetwood Mac and achieved global fame. She somewhat successfully maintained a professional relationship with an ex after a rough breakup. She launched a hit solo career. She saved her life and got clean from drugs. She’s written a long line of timeless hits and contributed her voice to even more. The list goes on.
With a career that spans decades and a reputation that has only grown stronger and gained respect, year on year, Nicks has done and achieved things that most can only dream of. But as a testament to her character, the thing she picks out as her number one greatest achievement is actually less about her and more about the collective.
“I think probably being the first woman to go into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for my own work—going in as Stevie Nicks last year, after already being inducted with Fleetwood Mac in 1998,” she said when prompted. It’s not about the Hall of Fame, though, as the band’s induction earlier was cool but merely another award. Instead, it was all down to what it meant to her as a woman and what it meant for women in general.
Nicks is slightly wrong here. She wasn’t the first woman inducted for her solo work, but she is still one of the many ceiling-breaking ones in the hall. She’s one of only three women to be inducted twice, whereas by the time she got her honours as a solo artist, 22 men had already had a repeat reward. She was the first to win that double medal, and, for her, that’s the important thing.
Her induction as a solo artist, too, is important. It makes the point that women stand on their own. It reminds people that Nicks is not, and never has been, just one of the girl singers in Fleetwood Mac, brought into the group just because they wanted her boyfriend. No, it makes the clear statement that she is an artist in her own right and true rock and roll royalty without the need for any help or any man by her side.
“I feel like I broke a glass ceiling there and let it rain on all those guys who thought there’d never be a woman that would go in twice,” she said, and she celebrated it well, saying of the night of her ceremony, “That was one of the most fun nights of my whole life.”
