The song that defines Stevie Nicks, according to Lindsey Buckingham
The mountains can be a lonely place, especially when your lover has gone off and left you. Stevie Nicks knows this feeling all too well. In the early 1970s, she found herself cold and alone in the hills of Aspen, shivering to the proverbial core, as Lindsey Buckingham drove off towards a slither of sun.
The young pair had met through music. Nicks attended Menlo Atherton High School as a senior, where she first crossed paths with Lindsey Buckingham at a Young Life social event. He was playing ‘California Dreamin’’ and she provided sweet harmonies. They were just about married through music for all eternity thereafter. The first of many of their partings perhaps hurt the most.
From the first moment they played music together, they knew they wanted to make a go of it. They weren’t even sure what ‘it’ was, and they were certain it wasn’t going to be easy. However, after years without much luck, Nicks began to think that the whole thing might just be too hard, as Buckingham left her behind in Aspen to take a much-needed paycheck playing with Don Everly on tour.
Nicks had encouraged her long-haired lover to leave and pursue the opportunity, but being left behind pained her. This motif plays out throughout her songwriting in the years that have followed. From ‘Landslide’ to ‘Silver Springs’, the notion of not only breaking up but being left behind features profoundly in her back catalogue.
However, Buckingham figures that none define her moving style quite as perfectly as ‘Dreams’. In truth, that also means it defines Buckingham pretty well, too. As the guitarist explains, “We were all writing about each other on Rumours, but that song also represents a sort of a quintessential marriage of what Stevie brought to the table and what I brought to the table for her.”
In the midst of a mutual breakup within the band, the Rumours sessions were notoriously harrowing, but with downed inhibitions, Nicks was able to let herself flow. ‘Dreams’ found her in an open-hearted mood. “If you break it down to its core elements, it’s brilliant in terms of its lyrics and the placement of its melody and the sense of rhythm, but it’s only two chords and very repetitive,” he told Vulture.
That repetition strikes at the heart of the song. There is no major arc to the music, just a repeating cycle. While it might have been unbeknownst to Buckingham and Nicks at the time, that cyclical structure captured their relationship with unrelenting aplomb. This simplicity strikes at the heart of Nicks’ songwriting. In a state of emotive inertia, she spills her soul into song, and then she had the wherewithal and bravery to hand these delicate tunes over to Buckingham to build into robust classics.
“So, that reminds me of her,” he continues, “But it also reminds me of us as a musical force together. It speaks to the quintessential essence of what we could be together, in terms of her and me coming together and adding our own things to make something greater than the sum of its parts.”
That’s not just how he saw ‘Dreams’, or even his writing relationship with Nicks, but it’s also how he saw the whole of Rumours. “Whatever was going in the band, specifically between the two couples, very much informed the material, and I think that was a very great appeal of the album. If you look at the success that the album enjoyed, I think it goes a little bit beyond the music itself.”
There can be no doubt that the tension within the group would leak into everything the album would become, as Buckingham continues: “I think a resonance kicks in that has to do with the interaction of the people, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts and I think a tangible element of that is the fact you had these dialogues shooting back and forth between members of the band about things that were happening to all of us while we were recording these songs.”
In truth, while Buckingham may well have been speaking impersonally, all of Nicks’ songs have that same lived-in sense that borrowed Rumours the hefty weight he mentions. None more so than ‘Dreams’—a song so simple that it speaks to the very sentiment that music has a soul that stretches beyond its constituent parts. Now, the amount of musicological studies could ever surmise how the depth of days spent alone in Aspen, and the fortunes that lay ahead, wound up imbuing ‘Dreams’ with a splendour that defies its dainty structure.
