(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 8 February 2026 15:30, UK
Stevie Nicks didn’t break into the industry trying to tear down any competition.
For her, music was all about someone offering their own take on life whenever they sang, and it was no use trying to leave the rest of the music industry in the dust if she was just being herself whenever she sang. She may have had her moments of getting into competition with Lindsey Buckingham in the studio, but she had enough self-awareness to realise when she was looking at a one-in-a-million band whenever she started singing.
Before Nicks had even become ‘The Gold Dust Woman’, she was paying close attention to see if she and Buckingham could have added anything to Fleetwood Mac. You have to remember that the band had started off as one of the most successful blues outfits in England almost a decade before they joined, but Nicks figured that she and her boyfriend could add a little bit more musical weight to their sound when they started making tunes like ‘Landslide’ and ‘Say You Love Me’.
Not every song that they made was exactly bluesy, but you couldn’t deny the passion that went into it once they started working on Rumours. The album itself may have been a nightmare for all of them to go through, but even if they had to muscle through songs about their strained relationships, you could hear the sincerity in Nicks’s voice when she talked about the rain washing her clean on ‘Dreams’ or casting out a demon from her body on ‘Gold Dust Woman’.
But by the time that Tusk had started, the rootsy rock genre was looking a lot more crowded. Eagles had been making a name for themselves for even longer than Nicks had, but even compared to the magic that she was creating in Fleetwood Mac, nothing could stop her from throwing on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at every opportunity. She would have left the band to join them if Petty asked her to, but she had to realise what she was getting herself into when she jammed with them.
Petty might have helped her get her first solo single on ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ and even let her feature on songs like ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, but that sense of magic was a two-way street. The heartland rocker had a great sincerity to everything he sang, but Nicks was always the one bringing the added sense of drama to many of his songs, whether it was harmonising on ‘Needles and Pins’ or singing a delicate background vocal on the song ‘Insider’.
And even with those years in ‘The Mac’ under her belt, Nicks felt that few things could match what she did when jamming with Petty, saying, “I became instant friends with them and they gave me a lot more leeway then they give any other women. So I’ve ended up, over the past many years, flying to god knows, far, far away, to play, to sing the songs that he and I have done together on stage with them. And there has never been an experience for me like walking on stage with Tom & The Heartbreakers, or Tom and Bob Dylan and The Heartbreakers.”
Petty even managed to make a joke about it when giving her a badge that read ‘the only girl in our band’, but it wasn’t like Nicks was musical window dressing, either. Every time she sang with him managed to make the song better, and there’s a good chance that some of his songs wouldn’t have been half as good as they became without Nicks’s voice filling out the backing track behind him.
So when Fleetwood Mac parted ways with Buckingham in the 2010s, having Nicks hire Heartbreaker Mike Campbell to fill in that slot was practically her way of returning the favour. She had spent so much time in his old band, so why not bring a little bit of that heartland rock magic to tunes like ‘Oh Well’?
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