“I’m not gonna do it”: The singer so good Stevie Nicks is afraid to cover her songs
There’s nothing wrong with a sense of healthy competition among musicians. Even though everyone should want to release music that’s authentic to them, it’s a different conversation when people start using their songs as an excuse to leave their contemporaries in the dust whenever they get behind the microphone. While Stevie Nicks has never taken to the stage not ready for war, she admitted that she would never be able to touch what this rock goddess played no matter what she did.
And that’s saying something coming from the same musician who is practically a watch whenever she sings. Looking through Nicks’s greatest music, both in her solo career and with Fleetwood Mac, her songs capture a moment in time whenever she plays, almost like watching scenes from a Shakespearean movie play out in real-time whenever singing along to tunes like ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’.
Because Nicks never approached rock and roll in the same way that technical wizards like Brian Wilson did. She only claimed to know a few chords on the guitar or piano, but whenever she did find the time to write her tunes, their power came not from the complexity of the chords but the emotion that was being driven out of her whenever she performed them, like her siren wails at the end of ‘Gold Dust Woman’.
If all of Nicks’ studio recordings were sketches for what she would create live, Kate Bush could very well be considered a mad scientist. Aside from being one of the youngest female singers to have a number-one original hit, Bush was looking to create entire landscapes with her music, whether that was the strange theatrical scenarios on The Dreaming or dealing with her own problems through song on projects like The Red Shoes.
Even though her style of music could be called baroque pop, that’s drastically underselling what she does. There are certain aspects of orchestral tunes on her records, but a sequence like The Ninth Wave off of Hounds of Love could easily put many of Pink Floyd’s later records to shame in terms of making a lavish conceptual piece interwoven across multiple tracks.
She could still make fantastic singles like ‘Running Up That Hill’, but Nicks said that it would be a cold day in hell before she managed to equal anything that Bush recorded, saying, “‘Running Up That Hill’ was one of those songs that, when I first heard it, I went, ‘Oh I wanna record that song someday.’ Every once in a while, we do it, but you finally smarten up and go, ‘I can’t really do that song better than Kate Bush did, so I’m not gonna do it.’ Because if you can’t outdo her, then don’t bother.”
It’s not like it doesn’t go the other way, either. Bush might have a unique sound that no one could really equal, but listening to songs like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stand Back’, there are hardly many people who can create a specific sonic space with their music the same way that Nicks could, especially when she starts improvising different vocal lines whenever she performs them live.
But what Bush is doing goes beyond even that. Nicks might be creating certainly cinematic pieces of music, but judging from where the progressive pop queen has been going since the late 1980s, she is looking to build an entire sonic galaxy within the span of a few minutes.
