By the time she made it big with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks had already found her voice as a songwriter. Nicks had been in a professional and personal relationship with Lindsey Buckingham in the years immediately prior to their joining Fleetwood Mac, during which time the pair split songwriting duties more-or-less equally.
Now that most of her famous material is decades old, Nicks has a unique view of songs like ‘Landslide’ and ‘Dreams’. For the former, Nicks was asked by Forbes whether she views the song differently as a seasoned veteran of the music scene as opposed to when she wrote it as a young 20-something. Nicks compared the track to a favourite song of hers by Jackson Browne.
“Yeah, they do change for sure. It’s interesting that you bring up Jackson [Browne’s] song ‘These Days’ because the line in that I remember is the one, ‘Don’t confront me with my failures / I have not forgotten them.’ That line, because we all feel that way,” Nicks said.
“You don’t have to bring up my failures to me because I know exactly what they were. That’s a pretty heavy statement,” she adds. “It’s like ‘Music in the cafes and revolution in the air,’ sometimes just a sentence out of somebody’s song will mean a million things to you, who didn’t write it. Just to the person that’s listening to it. And sometimes us as writers are the last people to really understand.”
Nicks picked up on another Browne song for having a similar effect on her. ‘That Girl Could Sing’ was a top 40 single Browne released in 1980. Although Nicks was a famous star at that point, she had yet to meet one of her heroes.
“‘That Girl Could Sing’, one of my favourite songs because I always wanted to think that, even though I didn’t know Jackson Browne at that point, that he wrote that about me because, ‘Oh, I’m such a cool presence,’” Nicks claimed. “And when you take, ‘She was a friend to me when I needed one,’ and you remember those sentences and even the melody of those sentences.”
“When I tell people my greatest influences, I say Joni Mitchell for phrasing, she could fit 50 words in a sentence and have them sound glorious without being rushed or crushed in, so I really learned a lot from her about phrasing,” Nicks explained. “From Jackson, I learned about writing love songs.”
Check out ‘That Girl Could Sing’ down below.
