The singer that made Stevie Nicks want to be a musician: “I learned so much from listening to her”
No other artist has captured the spiritual power of music quite like Stevie Nicks. For as many unique melodic lines as she has written in Fleetwood Mac and her solo career, Nicks is more in tune with whatever happens between the notes whenever she steps up to the microphone. Although Nicks always thought of writing songs, it wasn’t until she heard one singer that she started to take her craft in a different direction.
When working in her first handful of outfits, there was a good chance that Nicks would work at Lindsey Buckingham’s side for most of her career. Since the pair had been involved in the folk-rock duo Buckingham Nicks, the guitarist was offered to join the new version of Fleetwood Mac, only to bring Nicks along for her prowess in making melodies touch people’s hearts.
Throughout their time in the classic rock act, Nicks’ material constantly tapped into something far more emotional than traditional rock songs. Even though songs like ‘Rhiannon’ or ‘Landslide’ may seem like any other soft rock tunes from the AM rock radio era, the intricacies in Nicks’s delivery make her sound like she’s inhabiting the songs for the first time, relating to the characters in a far more natural way.
When talking about her initial musical development, Nicks would confess to listening to Joni Mitchell to help frame her work. Years before the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman had gotten started, Mitchell was one of the residential artists among musicians, creating songs the same way that painters or sculptors would create brilliant pieces of artistic expression.
Throughout songs like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘California’, Mitchell was known to incorporate strange tunings, featuring cascading chord progressions that felt like the music was coming from deep within her soul rather than her mind. Outside of her pop-focused singles, tracks off of Blue would become some of the most harrowing songs she would ever write, taking her material into a darker place after losing the most important relationship in her life.
Looking back on how she writes, Nicks would say that she learned from what Mitchell had done. When first cutting her teeth as a musician, Nicks would find a companion in Mitchell’s music, telling BAM Magazine, “I learned so much from listening to her. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be doing this if it hadn’t been for her. It was her music that showed me I could say everything I wanted to and push it into one sentence and sing it well. I remember lying on the floor, listening to Joni’s records, studying every single word”.
Even though Nicks would go on a different track than Mitchell as the years went by, it’s easy to see how she found her voice as well. Throughout albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Bella Donna, Nicks was looking to write songs that were to the point, hitting to the root of an emotion rather than tip-toeing around the issue.
Then again, one of the greatest lessons that Mitchell ever had to teach involved following one’s muse. While Nicks may not have sounded exactly like Mitchell every time she stepped to the microphone, the goal was to quote one’s own heart rather than dressing things up in someone else’s image.
