(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 9 December 2025 15:13, UK
There’s a level of entrancement that emanates from Stevie Nicks that is very difficult to ignore. As a member of Fleetwood Mac, she was a beguiling force akin to an ethereal thunderstorm. Out o her own, she maintained, through leather and lace, a spritiualtiy that was almost impossible to tear away from.
It speaks highly of Nicks that this notion doesn’t just reside in her costuming or performance. While gifted in both areas, able to ascertain and deliver her artistic vision better than most, Nicks is also a gifted songwriter. Across decades, she has delivered rock anthems that have felt more like soulful awakenings than the top ten hits they would become. The truth is, there’s something special about Stevie.
Folk music’s simple core tenet of ‘four chords and the truth’ really illuminates the odd notion of what connects with us and what doesn’t. As you go through life, you’ll enjoy thousands upon thousands of different songs and albums, but there are a few that stick out with a resonant singularity, like a home amid a block of otherwise uniform flats, and become transcendent pieces of art by which you can chapter your life. For Stevie Nicks, her formative years were soundtracked by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Speaking about the impact of Déjà Vu, the Fleetwood Mac phenom remarked: “I spent my whole summer after my senior year listening to nothing but that record for three solid months. Every single song from ‘Helplessly Hoping’ to a bunch of songs I would really like to record.” She was the perfect age for the arrival of the record, and it proved deeply moving for her upon release, but it has far from been left as a relic from a blissful three-month period in her past.
Songs “do change” over time, Nicks admits. Or is it us that changes them? Well, she muses: “Sometimes just a sentence out of somebody’s song will mean a million things to you, who didn’t write it. Just to the person that’s listening to it. And sometimes, us as writers are the last people to really understand.”
Even your perception of artists can change with gathered understanding, and that is exactly what has kept Déjà Vu alive for Nicks, whose passion for the four players behind it just keeps growing. “I love Neil Young,” she told Forbes in 2020. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Joni Mitchell and just that whole era of people. Buffalo Springfield in the last seven, eight months. I’ve been listening to a lot of their music on my Sonos, and it makes me happy.”
Nicks continued: “And I’ve decided that Neil Young was actually a lot more… he wrote a lot of very loving love ballads. He was not only the huge rock and roll crazy guy that I always thought. There are so many ballads I’ve gone, ‘Wow, you know what? You’re just a big pussycat. I can’t believe it.’ No wonder they chose him to come into Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
For Nicks, this completed the perfect foursome. The band were looking for some tender songwriting to match their lilting tones, and Young was more than happy to indulge his soft side. She likens this to another band she’s well versed in. “They wanted somebody like the Eagles wanted Joe Walsh,” Nicks explains, “They wanted somebody that would have that heavy hand. But then when you listen to something like ‘Slowpoke’ or some of these amazing songs, I’ve been blown away over the last couple of months listening to his ballads going like, ‘This guy, really seriously, in a way, wanted to be in love’.”
And perhaps it is this degree of vulnerability and honesty that makes Déjà Vu such a connective record for so many people. Of course, the performances are astounding, but as Woody Harrelson says about acting, “What is it that really makes a performance compelling? I guess it is just the degree of vulnerability, maybe?” And maybe the same is true for music. For Nicks, Déjà Vu wasn’t just four guys jamming, but a real earnest statement you could identify with.
“And talk about protest songs,” she concludes, “‘For What It’s Worth’ and ‘Ohio’, they wrote some really amazing protest songs. You’re like, ‘Wow, those things could have been written today too’.”
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