Stevie Nicks’ Advice to Her 28-Year-Old Self

“I am pretty fearless, and you know why? Because I don’t handle fear very well,” said Stevie Nicks. “I’m not a good terrified person.” Nicks has always followed her instincts in music, love, and aspirations and divulged nuggets of wisdom along the way. “If you have stage fright, it never goes away,” she once said. “But then I wonder: is the key to that magical performance because of the fear?”

After starting out with then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, and releasing their sole album together, Buckingham Nicks in 1973 before becoming two-fifths of Fleetwood Mac, early on, Nicks admitted that there were some learning curves—financially—early on during a 2020 interview.

“Almost a Millionaire”

When Nicks and Buckingham first joined Fleetwood Mac, they were living within more modest means. “We had no money,” shared Nicks. “I cleaned our producer’s house twice a week, and he paid me $250 a month, which paid our rent on a really cool little Spanish apartment [in Los Angeles]. Then later that year, we got back from [our first] tour, and we signed serious contracts, making Lindsey and I each one-fifth of the band. Together we were almost a millionaire.”

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At 28, Nicks went from being broke to managing six figures in the bank. “So we went from never having to file taxes—because we didn’t make enough money to file taxes,” she said, “to having to hire a business firm because we had way too much money.”

With Fleetwood Mac, Nicks contributed an assemblage of songs to the band’s catalog, including “Rhiannon,” “Dreams,” “Landslide,” “Gold Dust Woman,” “Gypsy,” and “Silver Springs,” through her solo hits “Edge of Seventeen” and “Stand Back” and eight albums from 1981 debut Bella Donna through 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault in 2014.

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“I Had Amazing Love Affairs”

Nicks lived the rock star life surviving addiction, loves, lovers, and then some, and said she doesn’t regret anything and would do it all over again. When asked what she would have told her younger self, Nicks’ had some very specific words of advice.

“I would just say, ‘Follow your heart,’ because that’s exactly what I did,” said Nicks in 2020 during the pandemic at the age of 72. “I followed my heart, and I had amazing love affairs—maybe that I shouldn’t have had—but my heart said, ‘Do it,’ and I did. I’m not sorry for anything.”

She continued, “Everything that was done was meant to be done in order for us to be sitting here today with the life that we have. So that I can be sitting here … at 72 years old, praying that the pandemic will go away so that we can all go back out and I can have the last 10 to 15 years of my rock and roll life. That’s really it.”

Photo: Fin Costello/Redferns