(Credits: Jimmy Kimmel Live)
Fri 13 June 2025 18:00, UK
It’s hard to know where to start when looking at the legacy of Stevie Nicks. There’s the musical side, of course, the side that’s an easier sell, showcasing all sides to her artistic beauty like neatly-placed tea lights in dimly-lit halls of endless discovery. Then there’s the personal side, the parts of her story that prove her resilience and defiance in the face of anything that came her way. And then there’s the part in the middle, where the two collide, culminating in stories that paint a picture of a true warrior with a genius mind.
“She sees all the romance and the drama in the world and she celebrates it,” Harry Styles said during Nicks’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She will stand on stage introducing a song, telling you how she wrote them—honestly—like you’re the only other person in the world.” But this is also the only kind of authenticity that makes you truly feel that way, too, like it’s only you her words are for, even though it’s her world, and we’re all just listening.
Suppose that’s also because, when looking at ways to describe Nicks’ legacy, the only natural direction is to go personal. The facts of Nicks’ story fall away when we look at the many times she’s made us feel, or the countless times she’s let us into the pieces of her soul others would keep hidden, like diary entries written for us to discover and relate to, even though we’ll likely never go through the same things or come out the other end the way she did, ready for another fight, another of many.
“You are a friend, and the words say in so many ways: I understand you and you are not alone. And that is true Stevie,” Styles said, capturing all the moments Nicks has ever pulled us in and made us feel alive with the threads of her story, the place where the music stops being just music and starts becoming worlds, worlds that reach deep within, painting us with the colours of Nicks’ own love, joy, sadness, and sorrow like they’ve always been our own.
There are many songs that capture this feeling, too. Many songs that show off Nicks’ inexplicable ability to pour her heart and soul into the art form as if they’re living and breathing pages of her own diary, filled with all the cadences of her own mannerisms in ways only the viscera of music could communicate. There are countless that show all the edges of her scorn just as much as her happiness, telling the story of her life through brief musical moments where, for that moment, that’s all that exists.
According to Nicks, when getting to know her journey, there’s no use in looking further than six songs in her catalogue, as she explained during a radio interview in 2000: “The lines from all the songs from, you know, ‘Sara’ and ‘Dreams’ and ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and ‘Stand Back’ and ‘Edge’. They’re all there. They’re all just like, lilting kind of, through the experiences of my life. And if you know the words to the songs, you’d be, you’d go ‘Wow! I really understand now. I really understand now.’”
These are all the ones that traced the lines of her experiences through loss, breakups, defiance, addiction, betrayal, and even liberation and redemption, not holding back on the darkness hidden within her personal truth, like the loss suffered in ‘Sara’, or the anger threaded passively throughout ‘Dreams’. These are the moments it all comes to the fore, letting you into her world without sugarcoating any of it, all intertwined with the poetic beauty of her lyrics and the rawness of her voice.
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