Credit: Far Out / Atlantic Catalog Group / Paul McCartney
October 22nd, 2026 · 12:30am BST
Long before she was twirling on stage in cascading chiffon and cementing her status as folk-rock royalty in Fleetwood Mac, a 17-year-old Stevie Nicks was sitting, guitar in hand, on her bed, absorbing the seismic cultural shift of The Beatles.
But while the rest of the world was swooning over Beatlemania, Nicks was looking deeper. For the songstress of rock, Paul McCartney’s 1965 ballad, ‘Yesterday’, was something altogether more prophetic than the ballad we know and love.
‘Yesterday’ would go on to become one of the most played songs in human history, woven deep into the fabric of rock culture. On US radio, it became not only the most-played Beatles song of the 20th century, but the third most-played song of the century by any artist, according to BMI. Yet beneath its ubiquity lies a solemnity that stopped a teenage Nicks in her tracks.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Nicks offered what can only be described as a distinctly ‘Nicksian’ interpretation of McCartney’s masterpiece.
“I think ‘Yesterday’ was very much a premonition of Paul of what was to come with Linda,” Nicks reflected, pointing to McCartney finding his great love and, decades later, enduring the heartbreak of losing her. It is a sweeping reading, but an undeniably romantic one, and it turns the song into a script written by destiny.
To understand why Nicks interprets the song this way, it helps to look at her own artistic DNA. When ‘Yesterday’ dropped, she was a teenager creating compositions that would later become her inimitable folk-tinged heartbreak songs. Upon hearing Help!, she marvelled at how The Beatles dared to dive into the messier intricacies of human relationships rather than sticking to surface-level tropes.
“It was like having four great teachers showing you how to write songs.”
Stevie Nicks
Traditionally, critics point to McCartney’s genius through his melodies and structural innovation, but through her uniquely eccentric worldview, Nicks heard something almost clairvoyant. This is perhaps derived from both McCartney’s and Nicks’s abilities to distil the raw aches and emotions of existence into something the masses can latch onto.
Further reading: From The Vault
As she told Rolling Stone, Nicks’s own lifelong mission statement as a songwriter was to express what others could not: “I’m going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I’m going to write the songs that people can’t write for themselves.”
Little wonder, then, that she has called ‘Yesterday’ the “perfect song”: it does exactly what she has spent a lifetime trying to do. Once you know this, the lineage is easy to hear. Listen to the emotional architecture of ‘Dreams’, with its vulnerability and refusal to over-explain, and you can hear the same refined style. McCartney may have written ‘Yesterday’ on his own, but what Nicks learned from it became something unmistakably ‘Nicksian’.
