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Sat 1 August 2026 2:00, UK
Stevie Nicks didn’t ever want to be tied to a band like Fleetwood Mac for the rest of her life.
They were her family in lots of ways, but there were also more than a few moments throughout their career where she needed some space, and it would have been a damn shame had she not been able to venture out into her solo career at some point down the line. There was so much more for her to explore outside of her band, but there were also a few people out in the wild that seemed destined to join a band like them whenever they started making their own music.
But you have to remember that Nicks wants to work with virtually everyone she can who catches her ear. There are plenty of opportunities for her to make landmark records on her own, but when you listen to her singing with someone like Natalie Maines from The Chicks or Harry Styles, something just fits whenever their voices blend. It’s like Nicks was searching for kindred spirits, and she definitely found a few once she decided to leave the band.
For one thing, Tom Petty seemed like the protective older brother that she never had in the music industry. He was willing to do whatever he could to help her out in the early days of her solo career, and Nicks was forever grateful to be able to have someone like him by her side whenever she made some of her hits. But the more time you spend in the industry, the more you become like a wise sage to the younger artists out there.
Nicks was bound to stick around for a while after Bella Donna blew up, but when the biggest female rockers came out after her, she seemed to be like the fun aunt of rock and roll. She was willing to do anything she could for people who were on the same wavelength as her, and to this day, she still has an affinity for what artists like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd were doing once they weren’t making music.
The world of pop stars always appealed to her, but there was something different about Rihanna when she first heard her. She was the epitome of what an R&B singer was supposed to sound like in her early days, but given her vocal range on some of her biggest hits in the 2010s, Nicks felt that the pop starlet could have held her own had she been born around the same time that she was.
Nicks had everything covered in her band, but from the moment that she laid eyes on Rihanna on television, she knew that she had what it took to be in a band like Fleetwood Mac, saying, “If I ever met her, I’d call her Rhiannon. I’ve adored her since she did ‘Shut Up and Drive’ on Letterman. I thought, ‘That girl could be in Fleetwood Mac.’ She can do it all.” And that mostly comes from the ballads that she sings.
Further reading: From The Vault
Rihanna probably wasn’t going to need to be playing some of her dance-inspired tracks had she joined Fleetwood Mac, but if you listen to the way that she sings, you can hear what Nicks was talking about. She had the potential to sing rock and roll, and there was a certain rasp in her voice that made her sound absolutely heartbreaking whenever she sang some of her downtempo songs like ‘Diamonds’.
The thought of anyone replacing someone like Christine McVie doesn’t really feel right in the context of Fleetwood Mac, but Nicks knew that people like Rihanna could keep their brand of musical mysticism going for years at a time. Because as much as Fleetwood Mac was about the music more than anything, Rihanna seemed to have the same kind of mystique that made people not want to take their eyes off of Nicks in the mid-1970s.
