(Credits: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher)
Wed 24 December 2025 19:00, UK
For Stevie Nicks, her songs are a far more sensitive beast than the average rock and roll classic.
Many of her greatest hits may have featured some kickass moments when working with Fleetwood Mac, but whenever she got in front of the microphone, her songs were about a feeling far more intimate than what everyone else was saying. She wanted to make something that could touch people on a deep level, and she didn’t need to look far to find other artists that were on that same musical wavelength.
Because in a post-Nicks world, plenty of artists have been able to speak their mind much more freely. Nicks had the courage to talk about her own experiences after seeing what was coming out of Los Angeles at the dawn of Flower Power, but if The Doors was showing everyone the dark side of what the Summer of Love could be, Nicks never lost sight of those ideals when she was quoting her own heart.
She was following in the footsteps of her idols like Joni Mitchell whenever she wrote her tunes, and she knew that the best way to write was to be brutally honest. They might have made for more than a few uncomfortable moments when working on records like Rumours, but it’s easy to hear her vulnerability underneath all of the emotional scars when listening to tunes like ‘Dreams’ or even earlier tracks like ‘Landslide’.
Despite standing alone in her field, Nicks ended up showing millions of songwriters what was possible if they opened up their heart. While Sheryl Crow may have been close to joining a lineup of Fleetwood Mac at one point, when Christine McVie, it’s not like she hasn’t been a disciple of what Nicks has done, down to the way that she emotes on tracks like ‘Everyday is a Winding Road’. But of all the Nicks acolytes, it’s hard to imagine Dave Matthews playing a large role in her life.
He may be one of the biggest concert draws to come out of the US, but Matthews is far from the most engaging songwriter in the world. There’s certainly a lot to work with if you listen to albums like Crash, but even by Nicks’s standards, she was immediately in tune with what Matthews was talking about when he released his signature tune ‘Crash Into Me’.
While the song has been co-opted by every dorm-room kid with a guitar hoping to charm the ladies, Nicks felt that there was a much deeper meaning at the heart of the song, saying, “Dave’s ‘Crash’ came out in 1997 right when we (Fleetwood Mac) were getting ready to go on the road to do The Dance. And I just totally fell in love with that song. I told everybody ‘Someday I’m gonna record that song.’”
But whereas Matthews’s version does sound like a typical coffeehouse song on record, Nicks’s rendition has a lot more nuance to it. It might be a little surreal to see Nicks singing this kind of tune, but her more seasoned vocal approach actually brings a lot more depth to the song, even if some of the lyrics are a bit more sophomoric than what Nicks was used to singing on tracks like ‘Silver Springs’.
It’s not exactly the first choice that most people would think of for Nicks to cover, but she has always prided herself on keeping her ear close to the ground. Most people may have been too afraid to show their love for Matthews’s music, but if she could fall in love with this tune, it wasn’t all that difficult for her to drift towards everyone from Vanessa Carlton to Harry Styles later down the line.
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