Like most songwriters, Stevie Nicks looks to the relationships in her life for inspiration. From Fleetwood Mac affairs to intimate relationships with fellow rockers, the three Nicks songs below are some of her best relationship-centric songs.
Videos by American Songwriter
3 of Stevie Nicks’ Best Relationship Songs
1. “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You”
“Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” was inspired by Joe Walsh telling Nicks about the death of his young daughter. Nicks was so moved by the story that she penned this striking ballad. On top of being one of Nicks’ most recognizable songs, it’s also one of her most poignant.
Nicks once recalled why her and Walsh were such a good pair, saying that they were both the right kind of crazy for one another. In the end, they both chose drugs instead of each other.
“He thought — or so I’m told by my friends that Joe told — that one of us was going to die, and the other person would not be able to save them,” she once said. “And I did think I was going to die, absolutely. It took me a long, long time to get over it — if I ever got over it. Because there was no other man in the world for me.”
And the rain comes down
There’s no pain and there’s no doubt
It was easy to say, I believed in you everyday
If not for me, then do it for the world
2. “Storms”
Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had an affair while promoting Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus Rumours. It was a byproduct of both of their aching hearts. Though it wasn’t a long-lasting relationship, it did make a mess of Fleetwood’s marriage at the time. Nicks was so troubled by the whole thing that she wrote “Storms.”
“Oh, that one was a – excuse my language – f***-you to Mick,” Nicks once said. “I sat at my piano, a feminist woman, and I wrote it, to say that nothing you or anybody else can do to me can change the fact that, as the opening line goes: ‘Every night that goes between / I feel a little less.'”
Every night you do not come
Your softness fades away
Did I ever really care that much
Is there anything left to say?
3. “Silver Springs”
We couldn’t make a list of Nicks’ best relationship songs without including “Silver Springs.” She cuts Lindsey Buckingham to the bone with this spell-like number. We’d find it hard to imagine Buckingham doesn’t flinch each time this song comes on.
“I wrote ‘Silver Springs’ about Lindsey,” Nicks once said. “We were in Maryland somewhere driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Spring, Maryland. And I loved the name. …Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. You could be my silver springs…that’s just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”
(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for ABA)
