Credit: Far Out / Stevie Nicks
Sun 4 October 2026 16:00, UK
For someone who grew up in rock and roll during the 1970s, Stevie Nicks wasn’t out there to be an average rock and roll singer.
Her entire goal was to show people what could be done when you had a lot more muscle behind everything that you wrote, and for a genre that didn’t take as kindly to having too many female singers, Nicks was showing everyone that what she did never mattered, no matter what genre you were. It was about making the best songs that she could at any one moment, and even before she had a single classic under her belt, she knew that she had what it took to go the distance.
Anyone usually needs at least a little bit of blind faith to get them where they are, and even when Nicks was at the lowest point in her career, she was still trying her best to go above and beyond anything that she had ever done. No one would have felt that she had it in her when she was busy cleaning her recording engineer’s house on the side, but when she and Lindsey Buckingham sang together, there was some strange synergy that no one else could have predicted.
And when she was left to her own devices, she only needed a few chords to prove her point. She may not have known that many chords to begin with, but when you look through some of her biggest hits, the one thing that connects them all is the amount of emotion that she put into every single thing that she worked on. The chords didn’t matter as much as the lyrics and the melody, and that was all that she ever needed when making tunes like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Silver Springs’.
What she was doing helped reshape the narrative of what a singer-songwriter could be in the public eye, but she didn’t want to be the outlier. She knew that there were loads of people who were just like her, and while you could see her influence in everyone from The Chicks to Miley Cyrus in some sports, there weren’t too many people who could ignore the kind of music that Adele was making once she became the biggest star in the world.
It’s not that easy to spot Nicks’s direct influence on anything that soul balladeer was doing, but Nicks knew that she wasn’t just looking at some fly-by-night musician. Adele was in it for the long haul, and anything that she ever made was going to endure forever as far as Nicks could tell.
The rest of the world might not have been all that interested in the classics all the time, but no matter what kind of music that Adele was making, Nicks was sure that she was going to find a way to be a power player in the business, saying, “I’m so happy for Adele right now. She’ll do what I did — she’ll figure out a way to stay in the business. The big difference between her and me is that she has a child, and that will change things for her, but I think Adele knows what she wants, and I don’t think she’s in a hurry. And that’s great.”
Further reading: From The Vault
That’s a bold statement coming from someone who’s been playing their whole life, but Nicks knew legends when she saw them. Even in an age now where people are more concerned with the instant hype surrounding an album, Adele is one of the few people who can go away for years at a time and return as if nothing ever happened, like when she came out of the gate all over again with ‘Easy On Me’.
No one else really had that kind of power every single time they worked on one of their records, but Nicks was certain that what Adele did was about something more than your average pop song. She was quoting her heart in the same way that ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ had done years before, and even if she had a more homely life nowadays, she could still prove to everyone why her tunes were going to go down in history.
