Credit: Jimmy Kimmel Live
For musicians, inspiration really can strike at any time – while some exercise more control and stick to a creative idea they’ve come up with themselves, others follow a more organic process, allowing different things, from everyday activities to more life-altering experiences, to lead the way. Stevie Nicks fits into the latter category.
After all, only someone who has truly experienced all corners of love – the good, the bad, and the ugly – could come up with something as cutting as ‘Silver Springs’, in the same way that ‘Dreams’ could have only come from a heart scorned, its ethereal atmosphere only enhancing the bitterness Nicks felt at the time, challenging her romantic counterpart to reflect on everything they did wrong in the relationship.
That said, not every great Nicks song comes from a place of heartbreak. Some of them emerge from different threads of thought, or by randomly coming across something by another artist, which then inspires her to go off and do the same thing. This was the case with ‘Stand Back’, which Nicks wrote after hearing Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’.
The idea first came to Nicks when she was driving with Kim Anderson, and Prince’s song came on the radio. In a moment of pure excitement, Nicks ordered Anderson to pull off the freeway and into the nearest music shop they could find so that she could buy a tape recorder to capture her idea for a new song called ‘Stand Back’.
In the early days, when Nicks was writing material during her Buckingham Nicks era, she also mostly channelled the hardships she was feeling at the time, like the perils of chasing a dream she didn’t know would come true. Around this time, she wrote ‘Landslide’, which captured everything a heart on the rocks feels like, from the uncertainty of inevitable changes to a relationship that constantly felt delicate.
In the song, these themes are anchored in her reflections on fleeting circumstances, with Nicks discussing being “afraid of changing” because she built her life around someone, and the passage of time, where getting older makes you worry about all the things you’ve yet to do or achieve. And the biggest seed of inspiration came from a simple conversation with her father, who’d urged her to give it six more months before she quit chasing a career in music.
Another was one that Nicks didn’t actually write herself, from her 2001 album, Trouble in Shangri-La, called ‘Every Day’. Written by producer John Shanks and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Damon Johnson, the title for the song emerged when Nicks kept walking by her assistant’s desk, her eyes catching on a white CD that said ‘Everyday’ in red ink.
The CD was a song that Shanks sent to Nicks to listen to, but the title reminded her of Buddy Holly’s 1957 classic ‘Everyday’, which, incidentally, was also a really important song to Nicks growing up. It was “the main song in my childhood”, she once said, and in that moment, it felt fitting for the title of one of her own songs. It might not have made itself known until much later in her career, but that moment growing up was one that undeniably started it all, triggering Nicks’ tried and true approach of placing small seeds of her own influences into her own music.
The CD itself wasn’t Holly’s, of course, but once she’d actually listened to it – after the connection with Holly encouraged her to – she felt like it fit nicely within the broader repertoire of the record’s songs. And so, after hearing it, she immediately called up Shanks to go into the studio to record her vocals. Suffice to say, then, that without that little push from Holly’s ‘57 gem, Nicks might’ve never even entertained the idea in the first place.
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