Stevie Nicks has rock and roll stories for days. And in case she forgets any of them, according to a Q&A in this week’s first-ever New Yorker digital interviews edition with actress/writer Tavi Gevinson, she has nearly 50 years of meticulous journals to help jog her memory.
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“When I keep my journal, it’s big, like a telephone book, because I always feel that that will never get lost. So what I do is I write on the right side of the page, and then on the left-hand side I write poetry, which I usually take right out of my prose,” she told Gevinson. “So lots of times, when I go back to them, it’s to look at the poetry for songs. I would rather spend the time writing a new journal entry than going back and reading old journal entries, because if you go back you’re not going to go forward. I just try to keep going forward.”
The 73-year-old Fleetwood Mac legend also opened up about her burgeoning friendship with Lorde, what she’s learned from her longtime bandmate Christine McVie and the very important, prescient advice she gave to Katy Perry in a hotel lobby 10 years ago. Describing how fame, and the internet, can be destructive forces, Nicks gave as an example her chat with Perry at the Corinthia Hotel in London, in which the “Smile” singer asked her elder stateswoman for advice on handling chart rivals.
“I said, ‘I don’t have rivals,'” Nicks recalled telling Perry. “And her big blue eyes got bigger and bluer. And I said, ‘No, Katy, I don’t, and neither do you. You are Katy Perry, you’re who you are, you do what you do and you’re great at it. I’m Stevie Nicks, I do what I do and I’m great at it. We don’t have rivals. That’s just ridiculous.'”
Nicks said Perry responded by referencing one-time nemesis Taylor Swift’s “army” of fans and their brief mortal enemies in Perry’s fan crew, at which point the Mac singer recalled cutting Katy off and explaining, “‘That’s just bulls–t. You have to just walk away from that. Don’t carry that around in your mind because then they’re winning this game.'”
Gevinson, who first met Nicks in 2013 — after giving a TEDX Teen talk critiquing the trend of superficially “strong” female characters in pop culture that ended with the line “Just be Stevie Nicks” — opens the piece by describing an invitation to see Fleetwood Mac in Chicago shortly after the talk. At the show, Nicks dedicated “Landslide” to the Rookie founder and then gifted her with a gold, moon-shaped necklace, a “token she grants to those she’s taken under her wing.”
There’s another one of those necklaces Nicks is holding onto for one of Gevinson’s pals, Lorde, who sent along a question for her musical hero inquiring about how she stays in touch with her dreams. “You know, the last show that Fleetwood Mac did in New Zealand, I found out that she had come with her parents, and she didn’t tell me she was even coming, so I didn’t get to meet her,” Nicks said of Lorde.
“I have a moon for her, and it’s in a box with a little note, and I’ve never been able to get it to her. I don’t think Lorde is going to have any problem at all keeping in touch with what she does. I think she’s just as odd as you or me. She’s a strange girl, and so are we. And she’s a really great writer and she’s really good at doing her own recorded stuff. I don’t think that any real serious songwriter is ever going to have a problem staying connected to the dream world that allows us to write songs… Back to Lorde. She just has to keep doing what she’s doing.”
The wide-ranging chat also touched on the mythical “gothic trunk of lost songs” in a suitcase she misplaced when they were accidentally sold at a flea market while on the road in 1983 — not to worry, her dedicated fans tracked the demos down and sent them back to her. Nicks also described how the line about a “white winged dove” in her 1982 solo hit “Edge of Seventeen” was inspired by an odd airplane menu item, how her friendship with Prince in the 1980s led to her working with him on her “Little Red Corvette”-inspired 1983 hit “Stand Back” and why The Weeknd’s “Starboy” and rapper Nelly are key parts of her private music stash.
Read the full interview here.