“She Had Become This Witch”: The Fleetwood Mac Song That Transformed Stevie Nicks

From her eccentric, metaphysical songwriting to her flowing layers of black lace and chiffon, Stevie Nicks has always carried the persona of a magical, tambourine-wielding witch. Her Fleetwood Mac and solo pursuits both leaned into this imagery and style, which she brought to the table upon arrival to Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s.

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One of her most iconic tracks from the band’s seminal 1977 record, Rumours, was perhaps also the most transformative. As the album’s co-producer Ken Caillat later recalled, recording the song allowed Nicks to “become this witch she was always writing about.”

Stevie Nicks Has Long Been Obsessed With Witch Lore

Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, Rumours, was only the second to feature the band’s newest members, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Their stylistic contributions to the group blended with the original members while still representing their individual aesthetics and attitudes. Buckingham’s “Never Going Back Again” and “Go Your Own Way” reflect his folk-rock roots. Nicks’ “Dreams” and “Gold Dust Woman” had an ethereality that seemed to mimic her flowy attire and movements.

But as the band would come to find while recording “Gold Dust Woman,” this atmosphere came with a darker side. In a 2012 interview with MusicRadar, Ken Caillat said, “The song grew more evil as we built it. Stevie had a lot of Courvoisier in her, and she did this incredible, coyote-like howling at the end. She had become this witch she was always writing about. To accentuate her vocals, Mick [Fleetwood] went into this room we had mic’d up, and he broke sheets of glass.”

The breaking glass added to the song’s overall mood, which Caillat said was their primary focus. “I called over to SIR, and they sent over a bunch of weird instruments, like an electric harpsichord with a jet phaser that created a cool whooshing sound. We weren’t looking for musicality. We were looking for accents.”

It Was One Of Many Songs The Singer Had To Fight For

If Lindsey Buckingham was the master of folk-rock jams and Christine McVie was an expert pop hit maker, Stevie Nicks provided the British-American rock band with folky, albeit verbose, easy listening bops. Nicks often had to fight for the band to see her true creative vision, as her original drafts were not always the most sensible. This is where the power of Fleetwood Mac’s musical collaborations came into play. Buckingham was the one who found an arrangement of “Dreams” that the rest of the band didn’t find boring. And producer Ken Callait helped edit “Gold Dust Woman” down to a radio hit, much to Nicks’ chagrin.

“It was a weird song,” Callait recalled to Music Radar. “Truthfully, I wasn’t very excited about it. I couldn’t tell where it was going. It was typical Stevie. Most of her songs, in their inception, are close to 10 or 12 minutes long with endless verses and epic stories. My job became one of editing, taking all of these sections and making them flow, cutting out the fat. Stevie would go crazy. ‘Oh, that verse was about my mother! That part was about my dog!’ These things would mean something to her, but they had to work for the listener.”

Ultimately, “Gold Dust Woman” wouldn’t be the band’s most successful hit. It peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and was certified silver in the U.K. Despite its relatively humble performance, it stands as one of the band’s most enduring tracks decades later.

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