(Credits: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher)
Mon 5 January 2026 17:00, UK
Stevie Nicks has always sounded wise beyond her years. Even in Buckingham Nicks, her tone feels heavy with a thousand stories.
Over the years, Nicks’ vocals got raspier and thicker with a rawness that made her stories seem to be taken straight from folklore. When you listen to ‘Seven Wonders’ or ‘Silver Springs’, her voice is the shining star of the show, which makes the more emotionally expressive parts hit even harder – like she’s really feeling the words she’s singing, and so we are too.
Nicks’ voice has always been powerful because it’s her main tool for expression; when she’s singing about heartache, the emotion is there. When she’s singing about casting spells on her former lover, the angst comes through the grit. And when the emotions are too overwhelming to be condensed into one simple word, her voice carries the weight, telling you far more than language ever could.
For many people, it’s one of the reasons why Nicks is the voice of Fleetwood Mac. Although there were four other members, Nicks is usually associated with the band at their peak, not just in terms of her voice but also her storytelling technique and how she introduced a new, distinctly whimsical flavour to their sound.
Before she joined the band, there wasn’t as much of a palpable connection between the vocals and the stories they were telling, and while there’s a definite advanced level of playing on records like Mystery to Me, the Nicks period gave them a darker, poetic edge that ensured their timelessness in the pop-rock arena, because it also gave them their unique style, setting them apart from other rock bands and, with records like Rumours, cementing their place as pioneers in rock.
Growing up, Nicks had always admired similarly towering figures, many of them with the kinds of vocal technique that told stories she could resonate with. And even when she didn’t understand the themes or messages, she detected the beauty in their voices and tried to sing along to imitate them. In the early days, before she was a rock god herself, these were mainly Motown singers.
As she recalled to Rolling Stone, “I started singing when I was in fourth grade: R&B, all The Shirelles’ songs and The Supremes and The Shangri-Las. When I first listened to the Fleetwood Mac recording of ‘Dreams’, I said, ‘There’s that little girl that was singing along to The Supremes.’”
She added, “All the amazing Black musical groups who were Top 40 when I was in the fourth grade. Those are the songs that I learned to sing to. I wanted to be a part of that.”
While singing was Nicks’ main gateway into the music world, this eventually morphed into a fully-fledged performance, where, on stage, Nicks wouldn’t just sing the words, she’d become them. Through her mannerisms and on-stage attire, she’d become a living embodiment of her charming worlds, her mesmerising voice opening the door to all of the quirks that made her a quintessential rock legend.
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