What Stevie Nicks can teach us about dreams, heartbreak and magic - USA Today

Stevie Nicks has been a North Star for generations of fans.

Her idiosyncratic-but-beguiling fashion, her steadfast dedication to women’s rights and, of course, her mystical poetry set to music both with Fleetwood Mac and solo career all catapulted her into the stratosphere of superstardom.

Nicks’ influence is celebrated by peers both upstarts and veterans. Just ask Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo about how Nicks’ existence steered them.

Because Nicks’ history has been dissected endlessly throughout the decades, music writer Rachel Brodsky (Time, Rolling Stone, Paste) opted for a different route with “Lessons & Lace” (Harmony Books/Penguin Random House, 254 pps., out now).

The book, which bears the subtitle, “Everything I Know About Dreams, Heartbreak and Magic I Learned from Stevie Nicks,” takes a unique approach. Brodsky’s publisher’s idea to create a “prescriptive biography,” rather than a typical cradle-to-career overview, intrigued her.

When research surfaced many recurring themes – ambition, love, health, spirituality – Brodsky knew there we lessons to be learned from the mighty psyche of Nicks. She also decided to intersperse these lessons with personal experiences, cementing the relatability and timelessness of education gleaned from the Church of Stevie.

While Brodsky has never interviewed Nicks – “I hope that will change,” she tells USA TODAY – she does have one hope if Nicks learns of the tome.

“I would just love to know that she felt that I captured her essence in any way,” Brodsky says. “I don’t care about anything else.”

Here are some insights Brodsky captures in “Lessons & Lace.”

If Brodsky had to choose one Nicks quote that became her guiding principle while writing the book, it would be, “What I seem to want, I’ll find a way,” from the opening verse of “After the Glitter Fades” on Nicks’ smash 1981 solo debut, “Bella Donna.”

“I would just like to needlepoint that on a pillow or put it on my grave stone,” Brodsky jokes. “That’s been, without me realizing it, something that I’ve always done as a human being. Even if it’s not practical or what everybody else does, I always figure out a way to make it happen. I deeply connected with that sentiment from her.”

Throughout Nicks’ career, her interest in the metaphysical, her ethereal lyrics about fate and spirituality, even her onstage twirling in billowing capes, have led some to think Nicks is a witch.

In the book, Brodsky quotes Nicks from a 2014 interview in the Los Angeles Times, having to tell people, “I’m like, ‘No, I’m not (a witch)! I just wear black because it makes me look thinner, you idiots!’”

“That word is so negatively stigmatized,” Brodsky says. “She’s not actually, like, in an occult.”

But the more significant misconception – or at least slighting – of Nicks is how often her songwriting is overlooked because of the fascination with her image and, at least at the start of her career, her very femininity.

“In the ‘70s, she was so dismissed. She was dismissed by Rolling Stone early on. She was dismissed by (famed music journalist) Lester Bangs,” Brodsky says. “I think they found her otherworldly presentation – draped in shawls and dancing emphatically – like, what is this California woo-woo chick all about?”

A favorite theme of Brodsky’s in “Lessons & Lace” is how Nicks embodied feminist ideals long before she described herself that way.

As recently as September 2024, Nicks demonstrated her commitment to women’s rights with the release of “The Lighthouse,” an anthem she started writing after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

"This may be the most important thing I ever do,” Nicks said upon the song’s release.

But, as Brodsky points out in the book and in conversation, “Long before (Stevie) was saying things in certain language in public, she was showing 'This is what I stand for and this is what I’m about',” she says.

“When she was just starting out, Fleetwood Mac as a unit collectively decided that, ‘We’re not a political band.’ But Stevie was always sort of living her politics even then. She made a decision she wasn’t going to be a wife and a mother and made a very pointed decision to prioritize herself and her art … As she grew older and the cultural landscape began to evolve, you can see that she’s been quite forthright in her beliefs for a long time now.”