For over 35 years, Stevie Nicks has enchanted millions of listeners with her unique brand of mystic imagery, personal yearning and a touch of aggressive rock and roll.
Some women have been named after “Rhiannon,” a mythological figure from The Mabinogion, whom Nicks unknowingly wrote about after getting a novel about a woman named Rhiannon. Many artists have covered “Landslide,” which was borne of her uncertainty as she and guitarist/paramour Lindsey Buckingham struggled to make it in the music business. It led her to great commercial success and even greater turmoil in Fleetwood Mac and a highly successful concurrent solo career.
To compile this top-10 list, I’m going to have to ignore a couple of my biases. I think Nicks is at her best when she’s singing amps-to-11 rockers. She proved she could be successful at that with her take on Led Zeppelin’s “Rock And Roll,” but some of the songs on this list are more languid walks down a lane of imagery. Here, in order, are the top 10 Stevie Nicks songs, some of which are with Fleetwood Mac. Those songs will be marked:
10. Fall From Grace (Trouble in Shangri-la, 2001)
There are a number of reasons this is one of two songs off Trouble in Shangri-la that remain in Nicks’s set lists after her tour supporting that album ended in 2001. One, Nicks clearly enjoys performing a song she said was “without a doubt the meanest song that I have ever written.” Two, it includes some of the most direct lyrics she’s written: “I didn’t ask when you shook your head/I always accepted what you said as the truth/And the truth only.” As she mentioned in her PBS Soundstage special, the song has a little touch of love mixed in with the seething anger.
9. Destiny Rules (Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, 2003)
This song could almost be a sequel to “Fall From Grace.” I’ve occasionally described it as “Fall From Grace” on a Ritalin trip. It seems to continue the story after Nicks has resolved the bitterness that pervaded “Fall From Grace” and accepted the end of a tumultuous relationship philosophically and emotionally. The song also features phenomenal guitar work from Buckingham and more outstanding lyrics: “Six weeks in a foreign country, how the time flew/I didn’t speak the language but somehow I knew.
8. Stand Back (The Wild Heart, 1983)
An example of a song that aged poorly from a musical standpoint, I consider the studio version of this song all but unlistenable. As soon as it comes on, I reach for the skip button. However, the song takes on a completely different energy live, and it’s still one of the songs I most look forward to hearing when Nicks or Fleetwood Mac perform it. She infused new physical energy into the song on the Say You Will tour literally: She did some of her fastest trademark twirls during this song on that tour.
7. Beautiful Child (Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, 1979)
There’s so much heartbreak in this song. There’s so much imagery, and the lyrics are some of the most poignant and personal Nicks has ever written. “I’m not a child anymore/I’m tall enough to reach for the stars/I’m old enough to love you from afar/Even if I never hold you again.” Speculation about the meaning of this song has been rampant among the Fleetwood Mac fan communities. We may never know what exactly inspired it, but that’s part of the allure.
6. Landslide (Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled record, 1975)
I said earlier that I would be breaking from my own biases. This is one such example. Landslide is not anywhere near my personal favorites. I usually skip the song. However, lyrics that Nicks wrote as a scared 25-year-old young woman became incredibly prescient, and even more relevant now that she’s less than a month from her 61st birthday: “Time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I’m getting older, too.”
5. Sara (Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, 1979)
This is another song that’s fueled rampant speculation about its inspiration. Based on interviews, Nicks had several inspirations for the song. Part of it (“the great dark wing”) was about Fleetwood Mac drummer and former Nicks paramour Mick Fleetwood. Part of it was about Don Henley (“when you build your house, I’ll come by). Some of the speculation fueled on whether Sara was the name of an aborted daughter. I won’t use this space to get into that discussion, but I will say there were a lot of inspirations behind this song.
4. Edge of Seventeen (Bella Donna, 1981)
This was another song with a number of points of inspiration. After longtime Beatle John Lennon was killed outside his New York apartment in 1980, Nicks flew home to Phoenix, Ariz. to write a song about him. She chose the white winged dove as a symbol for Lennon, not realizing the bird comes from Arizona and nests in the Saguaro cactus. Later on, her father’s older brother became sick and she visited him with her cousin John. When her uncle died, she and her cousin were alone with him, which led to the classic lyrics, “I went searching for an answer up the stairs and down the hall/Not to find an answer/Just to hear the call of a nightbird.” To this day, it’s the song that closes a Stevie Nicks concert.
3. Smile At You (Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, 2003)
This song may have officially been released this decade, but bootlegs of the song have made the rounds of the Stevie Nicks fan community for years. There were versions originally recorded for Tusk and 1982’s Mirage that didn’t see the official light of day. One version is known as the “flaming, flaming” version and features some of Nicks’s angriest vocals, including the classic, “My first mistake was to smile at you.” Compared to this angry version, the one that made Say You Will was watered down. However, Nicks still managed great conviction for an old line that seems more appropriate now, “I am older now but I still remember/I took the greatest fall/I can’t accept her.”
2. Rhiannon (Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled record, 1975)
The story about the inspiration of this song is now famous among Nicks’s most ardent fans. She got the name from a now-hard-to-find novel and started writing this song, not realizing that what she wrote fit the Welch mythology of The Mabinogion. She first performed this song with Buckingham Nicks prior to her and Buckingham joining Fleetwood Mac. It got a tepid response at one show, providing a sharp contrast to recent concerts which see fans cheer wildly at the song’s opening notes.
1. Gypsy (Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage, 1982)
My favorite song of all time by any artist. This song may have only peaked at No. 12 on the charts, but its video was the most expensive in history at the time it was shot. The imagery of this song is incredible, with themes of friendship, the past and her best friend Robin Anderson coursing through the lyrics. It also features spectacular guitar work from Buckingham, who has said it’s one of his favorite songs of Nicks’s.
It’s true that beauty is in the eye, or in this case, the ear of the beholder. However, these 10 songs represent one longtime Stevie Nicks fan’s take on her best 10 songs.
