Stevie Nicks, “Everybody Loves You”
By Davis Inman
American Songwriter
By Davis Inman
American Songwriter
With a chorus hook that seems in equal parts inspired by the hit DNA of U2′s “One” and REM’s “Everybody Hurts,” Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart have penned a modern classic in “Everybody Loves You.”
The song comes on Stevie Nicks’ new album, In Your Dreams, produced by Dave Stewart. It seems appropriate that for Nicks’ first album in a decade, she’s chosen to tackle aspects of Fleetwood Mac’s complicated past: the romantic entanglements and revolving personnel doors that would lead to the group’s most successful work.
Fleetwood Mac began life as a Peter Green-helmed British blues rock entity, along with the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, for whom Green named the band and who would prove to be the only stable force through years of lineup changes.
By the early ‘70s, Green was out, and the band seemed to be switching guitar-playing singer-songwriters like relief pitchers in a baseball game. (1974’s Kiln House seems a clear high-water mark for the ’50s blues-meets-’70s soft rock transitional period caretaken by Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer.)
By 1975, Mick Fleetwood had moved the band to Los Angeles and was looking for a new guitarist. In a feature story, Nicks tells American Songwriter’s Lynne Margolis that “destiny” brought she and Lindsay Buckingham together.
“[Mick Fleetwood] definitely heard strains of Peter Green [in Lindsay Buckingham] and all the other famous guitar players who had been in Fleetwood Mac for the five years before that. So the fact that this big tall guy would come in and Keith Olsen would play him a song off a Buckingham-Nicks record that never really went anywhere, that two years before had opened to critical acclaim and then was dropped like a rock by Polydor—what are the chances of that? One in 20 million?”
Buckingham and Nicks would join the group and Olsen would produce the new lineup’s first album, Fleetwood Mac (their second eponymous release). The Buckingham-Nicks dynamic would help move the band into Fleetwood Mac’s golden era of ‘70s California smooth rock, which in 1977 produced Rumours, created in the midst of the power couple’s disintegration.
Stewart also headed up a famous formerly-romantic musical duo with Annie Lennox in Eurythmics, and Nicks says there was an unspoken bond between the two when working together on “Everybody Loves You.”