The writer who Stevie Nicks feels most connected to
Every songwriter tends to have a bag of tricks when creating their masterpieces. While it’s easy to quote what’s in one’s own heart when putting together a track, it’s also worth cribbing notes from other artists to get an idea of where your muse is guiding you. Although Stevie Nicks already had a myriad of incredible songwriters to work with in Fleetwood Mac, one of her biggest muses came from the world of literature.
When first starting, it was clear that Nicks was more interested in the lyrics of her songs rather than the structure or the melody. Across the album Buckingham Nicks, Nicks is far more in tune with the power of the lyrics on her respective songs, letting the instrumental sprawl out to create a natural bed for the rest of the words to sit upon.
That attention to detail never truly went away when working alongside Fleetwood Mac. Across her first album with the group titled The White Album, Nicks was already creating songs that were far more gripping than the usual blues rock the band had been used to playing, including the soon-to-be immortal anthem, ‘Landslide’.
As the group started toying with different sounds in the studio, Nicks had already begun to bring a spiritual side to her lyrics, creating ‘Rhiannon’ from the name of a witch based on Welsh folklore. Although Nicks may have introduced the term to her audience, the lineage of that name could be traced back to the work of Evangeline Walton.
Known for her works of literature throughout the 1930s, Walton had an equally strong connection to the ghost of Rhiannon, eventually writing an entire book on the Welsh witch in The Song of Rhiannon. While the book predated Nicks’ song by decades, Nicks always felt her work was intrinsically connected to the author.
When talking about Walton’s approach to literature, Nicks felt she had a kindred spirit in her, saying, “Someone sent [her books] to me back in 1978 because I’d written a song called ‘Rhiannon’ 5 years earlier. Walton started her work around 1934 and finished in 1974, which was right around the time that I wrote ‘Rhiannon,’ so I felt like when her work ended, mine began”.
While many of Fleetwood Mac’s future endeavours would involve the band members turning their songs on each other on albums like Rumours, Nicks made sure to keep a literate touch to most of her work. Despite the massive relationship downfall in the middle of a song like ‘Dreams’, the way that Nick pours over every single word reminds the listener that these songs are meant to be about the poem first and the instrumentation second.
That love affair for Walton would continue as Nicks grew older as well. Once the rights to Walton’s work were being sold at auction, Nicks would be the one to retain the rights to her work. While there has been nothing that has come of those texts at the moment, a musician of Nicks’s calibre could easily turn one of Walton’s into a self-contained concept album if she wanted to.
