(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 19 March 2026 1:00, UK
Stevie Nicks wasn’t the kind to be worried about her legacy when she first began working with Fleetwood Mac.
She was happy enough to be expressing herself through every one of her songs, and it was up to the rest of the world whether she was actually going to be remembered as one of the greats whenever she graced the stage. And while Nicks had a great track record for stellar live performances, she was honoured when she found out the kind of people that she was being put alongside whenever she turned on the radio.
But when Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham first joined Fleetwood Mac, they were already going to be a sea change for the band. No one was quite ready for one of the biggest blues rock acts in England to suddenly turn into a rootsy rock and roll band, but when they released Rumours, there was no sense in arguing with the songs. These were seasoned pros, and even though Niks didn’t play an instrument, she could create the perfect mood for any song she sang from the minute she walked onstage, whether it was more tender on ‘Dreams’ or unleashing her inner demon on ‘Rhiannon’.
If you look at what the rest of the rock and roll world was doing, though, what Nicks was playing onstage was a rarity at the time. Sure, there were people like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin who had come before, but none of them seemed to have the same kind of spectral energy that Nicks had whenever she sang, and it seemed like the rest of the world was just as in love with her once she struck out on her own.
Because when you listen to any of Nicks’s solo records or her tunes with ‘The Mac’, you can tell that she isn’t beating around the bush on any of these tunes. The song is the one place where she can be the most vulnerable and honest, so when she became the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, it felt like she had reached a higher plane of rock and roll stardom.
When you’re playing shows for as long as Nicks has, though, it’s hard to really gauge where she fits among her other living legends. Fleetwood Mac always seemed to have a bit of a friendly rivalry with bands like the Eagles, but when Nicks first turned on classic rock radio for the first time in a long time, it blew her mind to see her name next to some of the biggest names that the rock world had ever seen.
All the biggest names almost didn’t seem real at the time, but getting to hear her songs next to the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who was like walking into a dream, saying, “I think I was sitting in my apartment, and I heard one of the songs come on the radio, and it was played, like, after a Beatles song, or after a Who song, or a Led Zeppelin song, and I thought, ‘Oh my God. One of our songs has just been played right after Led Zeppelin. We’ve made it. We’ve hit the big time.’ That moment is forever in my mind—and that’s kind of how I feel about this. I feel an intense kind of slow-burning excitement about this that I have not felt in a long time.”
And it’s not like the rest of the rock world wasn’t impressed with her the same way she was. Led Zeppelin may have been at the top of the rock and roll world at the time, but even Robert Plant felt that it would have been fun to get Nicks on one of their tracks, which wouldn’t have been all that difficult to picture given how well she worked with their acoustic songs.
Whether Nicks will still be played next to Zeppelin and The Beatles later on is up for debate, but the fact that she got her songs next to those legends was as good a sign as any that she was becoming a superstar. Anyone can dream of making the best songs that they can and see their names next to their heroes, but Nicks learned that the best way to get people to listen is to play from the heart.
