Stevie Nicks Channeled ‘Gator-Like’ Vibes to Become Like Tom Petty

Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty were friends for years, and they collaborated on more than one song. Despite this, Nicks preferred to sing her own songs, not work written by other people. She made an exception for her 1985 album Rock a Little, however. She explained that she liked channeling others through her songs. Using Petty as an example, Nicks shared the way her own style changed when singing his songs. 

Stevie Nicks was good friends with Tom Petty

Nicks and Petty were good friends. Even before they met, though, she greatly admired him as an artist. 

“After I joined Fleetwood Mac, I started hearing Tom Petty on the radio,” Nicks said in the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes. “And I just fell in love with his music and his band. I would laughingly say to anyone that if I ever got to know Tom Petty and could worm my way into his good graces, if he were ever to ask me to leave Fleetwood Mac and join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I’d probably do it. And that was before I even met him.”

When they met, Nicks found that Petty lived up to her expectations of him.

“He was pretty much what I expected,” she said, per the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours by Zoë Howe. “There’s not a fake bone in his body.”

She said she channeled Floridian vibes when she sang her friend’s songs

Nicks wrote her first song after a high school heartbreak. The experience was fundamental to her as a songwriter. 

“I finished that song, hysterically crying. And I was hooked,” she said. “When I played my own song later that night, I knew — from that second on — that I was not going to sing a lot of other people’s songs. I was going to write my own.”

She made an exception for her album Rock a Little, which featured several collaborations and two songs written entirely by others. She said that the experience of singing other people’s songs allowed her to see the world through the writer’s eyes and channel their personality. When singing a song by Petty, for example, she became more like him.

“If I can relate to you, then I can become you and see through your eyes,” she said. “When I sing Tom’s songs, I become Tom; I become more Floridian and gator-like and have more of a drawl.”

Stevie Nicks still feels a connection to Tom Petty

The connection Nicks felt with Petty has lasted for years, even continuing on after his death. She maintains the connection by singing his songs in her concerts.

“It’s like, I don’t know, I think I just want to keep him with me. I just want to keep him here as long as I can,” Nicks said on the Zane Lowe Interview Series podcast. “Sometimes I’m in tears, sometimes I can smile with a little bit of the remembrance of the hysterical person he was.”