(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 10 January 2026 16:30, UK
By the time Stevie Nicks began taking over the world, no one truly knew what they were looking at.
There had been plenty of great female rockers at the time, but whereas someone like Janis Joplin could bulldoze over any audience with that booming voice, ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ felt like some strange witch that possessed her audience for an hour and a half every single time she sang ‘Dreams’ or worked her way through ‘Landslide’. It was a bit more subtle than usual, but Nicks already had a firm basis for what she wanted to sound like before she even moved to California.
That’s not to say that she didn’t get a healthy education of rock and roll when she began working with Lindsey Buckingham. The guitar genius was interested in building tracks at every single opportunity, and while most of his ideas were brilliant, his plan of having Nicks dissect every single Beatles and Beach Boys record she got her hands on was bound to take some of the fun out of performing. She was more into a natural vocal take, and that came from listening to the true performers of rock and roll.
She was never going to be on the same level as Elvis Presley, but from the first time she began performing to the tune of ‘Everyday’ by Buddy Holly when she was a kid, the goal was always to excite the audience at every opportunity. The best bands at the time, like Led Zeppelin, may have kept the audience entertained by being absolute monsters on their instruments, but the singer-songwriter scene that Nicks followed was a bit more introspective.
The tunes that everyone from Jackson Browne to Warren Zevon were making were small novellas in song form half the time they played, and Nicks wanted to be able to make someone feel the same way she felt listening to those tunes. She may not have had the same kind of musical knowledge as her peers, but hearing Linda Ronstadt was all she needed to realise that she could dominate the stage just as well as any other singer.
After all, Ronstadt never wrote her own songs all that much, but when it came to interpreting someone else’s work, there was no one else who could possibly touch her. There had been many people trying their hand at singing a tune like ‘You’re No Good’ or ‘When Will I Be Loved’, but every time Ronstadt opened her mouth, no one doubted for a second that she meant every single word she sang.
Nicks may have found her own niche, but when it came to her brand of performing, Ronstadt was the ideal figure that she was striving to be like, saying, “I loved all her songs and I got told great stories about her from all the amazing people that did know her. And I don’t really know how she slipped through the cracks, and I never really got to meet her. I should’ve gotten to meet her. Anyway, she was just like the perfect storm of everything meeting at the same time in perfection when she hit the radio.”
But that kind of perfection wasn’t something that Ronstadt wanted to stay in for very long. Even though she could have made an entire career out of being the patron saint of country-flavoured rock, the fact that she took so many chances on records like What’s New or working with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris gave people like Nicks confidence to go outside their comfort zones as well.
Because as much as musicians love the idea of people singing along to everything they play, it wasn’t only about making catchy tunes. It was about following your bliss, and if Ronstadt could go in any direction and still sound great, Nicks was going to play by her own rules the minute that she went solo as well.
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