‘You May Be the One’: the songwriting experience that made Stevie Nicks feel like The Beatles
One of the most common misconceptions around songwriting partnerships is the idea that only people with similar mindsets can work together. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as a good songwriting partnership requires not just creative minds, but different creative minds which explore possibilities the others wouldn’t. Stevie Nicks learnt about this when working on her 2011 record In Your Dreams.
This album came sometime after Fleetwood Mac had broken up. Fleetwood Mac were an excellent band responsible for great songs that people still love today. However, they are also a great example of what can happen when mindsets don’t align in creative groups.
A lot of people contributed to Fleetwood Mac’s music, and they were all good songwriters; however, the band members had strong differences, too. Relationship issues and drug and alcohol abuse involving the likes of Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, and Christie McVie meant that there was a lot of friction within the band, and this meant working together creatively was really hard.
People had different ideas about what made a good song, and pitches were rejected and scorned by various members. This led to frequent arguments and tension that impacted everyone enough to break up the band, but it also seemingly impacted Nicks going into her solo career, as she was always looking for harmony with songwriting partners rather than conflict.
Conflict when writing music doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you are working with somebody who shares all your ideas, you never leave your comfort zone because you have the same attitude towards what makes a good song. If you work with someone who disagrees with you and puts other ideas forward, you explore more creative range; this is how some of the best songs ever are written.
Nicks realised this when she was working on In Your Dreams with Dave Stewart, and she realised that conflict in the creative process doesn’t always have to be a negative thing and can, in fact, lead to some great work. “We wrote the song ‘You May Be the One,’ and my eyes instantly opened,” she said, “and I understood why Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote together – because they each had something the other didn’t have.”
Nicks continued, “And with Dave and me, he had thousands of chords and this amazing musical knowledge, and I had thousands of pages of poetry – and I know six chords. It was like an amazing little meeting of the minds, and I immediately went, ‘Well, this is just great!'”
This is what made John Lennon and Paul McCartney such a great creative duo. They both forced one another to go into creative areas they might not have explored otherwise. Naturally, those differences in creativity eventually became too much, which led to The Beatles’ split, but there is a sweet spot where the conflict in songwriting produces some of the best work of an artist’s career. The hard part is finding that sweet spot without creating a rift between you and the person you’re working with.
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