(Credits: Jimmy Kimmel Live)
Fri 5 September 2025 20:45, UK
Whenever you listen to Stevie Nicks, whether it’s a solo project or a Fleetwood Mac result, her poetic words seem to hold some kind of mystical energy that remains largely unmatched.
They give off that familiar spark of being artfully stitched together like never before: something you relate to but said in words you’d have never put together before. Like in ‘Thrown Down’, when she says “thrown down like a barricade” to diminish past anguish in favour of new beginnings, no matter how painful.
In 2011, Nicks said her muses for learning how to write songs were Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. Mitchell, who once said her secret was to write “copiously” about what she’s thinking and feeling before transforming her ramblings into song format, taught Nicks the power of being brave when it came to pouring your soul into art. “Their phrasing, the way they wrote poetry, the way they put their poetry to music,” Nicks said, “I studied, I laid on the floor and listened and read their words and just loved it.”
About Mitchell, she went on, “Joni taught me that you can fit thousands of words in every sentence if you sing it right. That was great to know because when you’re a poet, you don’t really want to shorten up your sentences.”
This eye for clever wordplay is also what makes her connection to The Beach Boys fairly unique. Rather than going for ‘God Only Knows’ when asked to name their best song, she went for something more thought-provoking. And not only was it pretty left-field, it was also one that was so “off the wall”, according to Brian Wilson, that he didn’t like it at all. But Nicks loved it for all the reasons Wilson hated it: its lyrics.
Describing it as the “quintessential” Beach Boys song, she once praised ‘Sail On, Sailor’, saying it “makes you think, ‘I need to go get on a boat and go out to sea’, and I happen to love to sail”. Wilson, on the other hand, didn’t think the lyrics were good, and claimed they made no sense. But that just proves that even geniuses can’t recognise the artistic value of their own work, where others, like Nicks, wholeheartedly can.
Similarly, she rarely felt that way about her own work. There are ones she loves more than others, of course, but mostly her distaste for others’ stuff came from how personal they were. Like on ‘Go Your Own Way’, she hated how Lindsey Buckingham insinuated she cheated on him, insisting she was loyal while he only “wanted to fall asleep with his guitar”.
Still, it’s hard to think that it also didn’t sit right because of the way it was said, as though Buckingham saying she was “shacking up” put a sour taste in her mouth, because if he was going to accuse her of anything, he could have at least been more creative with it. Saying it outright can be the best creative choice sometimes, but as we’ve seen, Nicks likes things with a little more of a flourish.
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