(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks)
Fri 10 April 2026 19:30, UK
Songwriting was never a means to become a star when Stevie Nicks first started writing.
Anyone can try to make the best hooks that they can and hope that they find an audience somewhere, but when you listen to a lot of Nicks’ best tracks, there’s no doubt that she’s coming straight from the heart every single time she plays one of her tunes. And while there aren’t many performers on this planet that could possibly match what she did, she felt that certain songwriters were a cut above everything else that the rest of the California scene was doing back in the day.
And that’s not some cheap praise, either. The entire California rock and roll world was full of one great songwriter after another. Eagles had just become one of the biggest bands in the world, and while Nicks was always keen to appreciate records by Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne was already making the kind of records that resonated with people whenever he started talking about his own personal relationships.
Not even Dylan could be that open in many of his romantic songs, but whereas Browne could structure many of his songs like three-minute novels a lot of the time, Joni Mitchell was looking to create art whenever she made a record. None of her songs were supposed to fit into the tradition of classic pop songs by any stretch, but when you listen to her singing about her pain on Blue or the wonderful landscape of California on Ladies of the Canyon, she was capturing a feeling on every other track.
Nicks wasn’t going to copy Mitchell by any stretch, but she did admit that there was no other songwriter that she knew who could compete with her, saying, “When I was getting started, Joni Mitchell was my greatest influence, because songwriters were the ones who I really emulated, and she was the best of the songwriters. But I don’t really listen to her anymore.” Then again, there was nothing malicious about Nicks not listening to Mitchell as much as she used to when she first started writing songs.
If anything, refusing to go back to her idols was Nicks’s way of trying to find her own voice in a lot of her songs. She was never going to bother with trying to be the second-rate version of what Mitchell was doing, so the next best thing would be to make songs that touched people’s hearts when talking about her own relationships. She could pay tribute to her here and there, but Nicks was far more interesting when she started quoting her own heart.
There are still a lot of people who listen to Rumours like some emotional car crash, but the drama behind every song is usually secondary to the actual music. Nicks was more than happy to talk about her feelings whenever she performed, but what makes a song like ‘Silver Springs’ great isn’t the fact that she is telling off Lindsey Buckingham. It’s because of the raw passion behind her voice as she promises to be haunting her old flame.
What’s even crazier is knowing that Nicks didn’t have the best knowledge of music theory when she first began. She only knew a handful of chords and relied on the rest of her bandmates to help fill things out behind the scenes, but if you look at the way she structures her melodies, a lot of them were a lot more sophisticated thanks to the way that Mitchell taught her when she used to listen to her best records.
While Mitchell eventually decided that she didn’t need to rely on pop music anymore, Nicks was never going to forget the impact that the folk rock icon had on her. The best songwriters up until that point were making songs that told you how to feel about any of their material, but Mitchell was the first of her kind to give you a stunning portrait of someone who had gone through enough heartache for anyone else’s lifetime.
