“These are my very favourite writers”: The three artists that taught Stevie Nicks how to write
In the early 1970s, high school student Stevie Nicks entered the Young Life Club in California to find a talented guitarist covering Barry McGuire’s ‘California Dreamin’. Immediately attracted to the musician, she ended up joining him to harmonise on the vocal. Afterwards, the musician introduced himself as Lindsey Buckingham, and they soon entered a romantic relationship.
The relationship between Buckingham and Nicks proved to be pivotal, given that they eventually joined the British blues-rock band Fleetwood Mac and helped transform it into a pop-rock sensation. However, their bond was anything but serene, as the turmoil reflected in Rumours attests.
In 1972, before the fame and furore, Nicks and Buckingham lived at their producer Keith Olsen’s house, where the former often found herself cleaning the house to pay her way. Towards the end of the year, Buckingham found work as a touring guitarist for the Everly Brothers. While he toured, Nicks took to her notepad and wrote what would become two of her most enduring and beloved songs, ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’.
On several occasions, Nicks has discussed Eagles as her and Buckingham’s greatest musical influence. But when it came to songwriting, she found inspiration elsewhere. In a 2011 interview, she identified her three most crucial songwriting influences as Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell.
Nicks praised the three acts for teaching her some of the most fundamental lessons in songwriting. “Their phrasing, the way they wrote poetry, the way they put their poetry to music,” she noted. “I studied, I laid on the floor and listened and read their words and just loved it.”
Although Nicks described her pre-fame years as a period of musical study, it was a labour of love. By listening to some of her favourite records, she learned the skills necessary to write the lyrics for her early songwriting attempts. “I never looked at it as studying,” she added. “I just looked at it as – these are my very favourite writers and my very favourite phrases because learning to phrase when you’re a poet is hard.”
Above all others, Nicks admires Mitchell as an innovative songwriter who taught her how to write from the female perspective and to protect lengthy lyrical passages from truncation. “Joni taught me that you can fit thousands of words in every sentence if you sing it right,” Nicks said. “That was great to know because when you’re a poet, you don’t really want to shorten up your sentences.”
Although Nicks had followed Mitchell’s career since the late 1960s, paying close attention to early masterpiece albums like Clouds and Blue, her favourite by the Canadian singer-songwriter arrived in 1974. At this point, Nicks and Buckingham had just released their studio album Buckingham Nicks, which helped to establish their voices in the music industry despite being somewhat overlooked at the time.
Little did the pair know at the time, but on New Year’s Eve 1974, they would join Fleetwood Mac in a moment that changed their lives forever. During the pre-Fleetwood Mac period, Nicks tried LSD for the first time and recalled a positive experience indebted to the comforting sound of Joni Mitchell’s voice on her classic 1974 album Court and Spark.
Speaking to Q in 2008, Nicks picked out the album as one of her all-time favourites and recalled her first experience with LSD. “One time I did acid when Joni Mitchell’s record Court And Spark came out,” she said. “I was with my producer at his house, with a set of speakers that were taller than the fireplace, and I was in a safe place, and I sat there on the floor and listened to that record, and that was a pretty dynamic experience, but it didn’t erase the fact that the other two times were not. So I never did it again.”
