The 1965 song that made Stevie Nicks love George Harrison: “A serious romantic”
Stevie Nicks tended to have a much different relationship with music than everyone else in Fleetwood Mac.
Lindsey Buckingham was the perfectionist looking to make everything sound immaculate when they made a record, but from Nicks’s perspective, all that it took to make a song sound great was if someone could feel the same kind of passion in the singer’s voice whenever they stepped up to the microphone. The whole idea of making a great record had to do a lot more with expression, after all, and that tended to go hand-in-hand with everything that George Harrison ever did.
When you look at The Beatles, Harrison was already a late bloomer when it came to writing songs. He wasn’t looking to be the massive superstars that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were, but even in his role as the quiet one on the side of the stage, he was more than willing to take a few chances and give the audience something that they wouldn’t have found in any of their other originals.
He was always a bit sardonic on some of his early songs, but even if he could be counted on to make tunes that are a bit more pessimistic, like ‘Don’t Bother Me’ and ‘Think For Yourself’, it wasn’t like it was all doom and gloom. There were some nasty tunes that he needed to get out of his system, but there were also more than a few times when he could be one of the most romantic musicians of all time.
‘Something’ is still one of the greatest love songs ever created, and when he did talk about affairs of the heart, it was usually in a much more spiritual way. He knew that the importance of God was what love was all about, and when listening to some of his low lights like ‘Long Long Long’, he was still trying to figure out what made him feel these feelings inside all the time. But for Nicks, she could have told you that Harrison was one of the most romantic singers from the first time she heard ‘I Need You’.
She had already been forced to dissect a lot of the band’s masterpieces by Buckingham back in the day, but Harrison seemed to be the one who jumped out to her when she first heard the song on Help!, saying, “I met George Harrison when Rumours was about to come out. He was very sensitive, a serious romantic, so I understand that he would write a song like ‘I Need You’. Listening to Help! was like having these wise elders – who weren’t that much older than me – giving you all of this information about what love is.”
And Harrison never did lose his touch when it comes to making truly devotional songs. A lot of them tended to be directed to God later on in his career, but even when he put down some of the preachiness every now and again, a tune like ‘Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long’ is still one of the best hooks that he ever wrote that no one seems to talk about all that often. Even if he was only singing what was in his heart, though, Nicks was going to use every lesson he had to teach in her songs.
Not all of her songs needed to have that same spiritual angle, but when she did talk about some of the harshest realities of heartache, she wasn’t going to be angry like Buckingham. All love tends to thrive off of strong emotions, but Nicks was looking to channel those emotions in a more thoughtful way, whether that was her trying her best to be levelheaded on someone else’s track or managing to be vindictive on a song like ‘Silver Springs’.
She could still be a little bit nasty when the time called for it, but the biggest call usually came when she measured her tunes up next to what Harrison was doing. Because from the time he left The Beatles, Harrison was used to doing things his way, and he was never going to make something that he felt didn’t reflect his life.
