“My mom gave me the first Barbie,” recalls Nicks, “and she was a tall, beautiful girl in a bathing suit with blonde hair, black eyeliner and heels. And I looked at Barbie and I looked at myself, tiny little thing that I was, and I thought, God, I’ll never be her.”

Sixty-five years later, Barbie has become Stevie Nicks – quite literally. In fall 2023, Mattel rolled out a new version of the iconic toy modelled after the singer, down to her signature black chiffon clothing, tambourine and feathered coif.

“I love her,” says Nicks of her mini-me. “I’m always taking pictures of her. I talk to her. I think she’s real.” she laughs: “People are like, ‘Stevie, we’re getting a little worried about you.’”

It’s a late spring night in Los Angeles and Nicks is in an expansive mood as she considers the cosmology of her remarkable life and career. In a sense, the Barbie story perfectly encapsulates the way in which the world has bent to her will for nearly 50 years.

As a member of Fleetwood Mac – which she joined at the end of 1974 – she’s come to define and, in many ways, dominate the group. At the height of their multiplatinum peak, she would venture off into a solo career with an equally success- ful debut, Bella Donna, eventually earning distinction as one of the only women elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.

These days, multiple generations of stars – including the biggest contemporary pop acts, from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey – all pay homage to Nicks. At 76, she’s arguably at the height of her cultural relevance and popularity, playing massive shows through-out the world.

“Look at the power and joy she brings to people,” says her bandmate Mick Fleetwood. “She’s like Edith Piaf. They love her. They feel her. And for good reason. Her story – and how she has sustained it over all these years – is monumental.”

“She’s a force,” notes Nicks’ longtime collaborator, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. “And it’s not just some iconic pop star thing, or about the way she looks or her style. Artist after artist – mostly women – talk about her as a creative influence, as an example of someone who just shone through in the midst of all the men in this business. She’s had a huge impact on things in a way that people don’t even realise.”

Fellow Heartbreaker Mike Campbell – who’s also written and produced projects for Nicks over the years – says it’s her total commitment that makes her so compelling.

“Stevie doesn’t have a family. Her career, her audience, that’s her life,” says Campbell. “She has a way of connecting with people in this very passionate, real way. And I think that’s why she’s so beloved. She’s really unlike any other rock star I can think of.”

“When Covid happened, I gave in very quickly to the fact that we were screwed,” she continues. “I just watched a lot of mini-series and movies and I didn’t write anything for the first couple years. I didn’t even sing. I figured, This is what the universe has in store for us right now. I’ll accept it. That’s the way that I’ve always been.”

Glance across the career of Stephanie Lynn Nicks and you can see how she might detect the guiding hand of fate. Born in Arizona in 1948 and raised across the western United States – Texas, Utah, New Mexico, California – her life seemed to unfold in a series of cinematic set-pieces.

The first came when she was nine years old and living in El Paso when her grandfather visited. Aaron Jess ‘AJ’ Nicks was a country singer, rounder and pool hustler, who married a strictly religious wife, and then promptly disappeared, returning periodically to sire three sons including Nicks’ father. “He really gave up his family to go on the road,” says Nicks. “My dad and uncles felt abandoned in a way, because my grandfather chose music.”

One day, AJ showed up with a pick-up truck full of 45s for his granddaughter. “He sat and played every record for me,” recalls Nicks. “There was Buddy Holly and The Everly Brothers, and some real hardcore country music too. As I would listen to all this stuff, I would be singing along. It’s not like anybody had ever taught me to sing, ’cos nobody had. He said, ‘Stevie, you can sing! And you can sing harmony.’ I didn’t even know what harmony was. Is that good? But he liked my voice, and he was kind of a badass, so I just thought, I can do this.”

While music came through her grand- father, a sense of drive was provided by her father. Jess Nicks was a smart, hard-working sort, who went from bar owner to beer distributor, eventually rising to Vice-President of transport giant Greyhound and later President of pharmaceutical conglomerate Armour/Dial.

As her future boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham would tell MOJO in 2015, “Her dad was ambitious and willing to uproot his family over and over in order to keep moving up the corporate ladder. I think that affected her on some level – it taught her how to make a splash.”

Even before she became a star, Nicks recalls making a splash as a student at San Jose State University in the late 1960s.

“I’d managed to get to San Francisco, to the store where Janis Joplin got her clothes and picked up two fantastic outfits,” says Nicks. “I would put those on and funk them up with heels and just walk through the campus with my Goya guitar, and it was like the Red Sea parted. It was just my attitude. People would be like, ‘Who’s that?’ I loved that feeling. ‘You don’t know who I am now, but you’ll know soon. The day will come.’”

Nicks’ entry into the music business came when she joined Buckingham’s band Fritz in 1968. The two had first met at a youth gathering in high school, when Nicks began spontaneously harmonising on a version of The Mamas And The Papas’ California Dreaming that Buckingham was playing. Fritz was a hardworking band that got a glimpse of the big time opening Bay Area shows for Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, even as Nicks continued with her studies as a speech communication major.

“I always told myself, if it comes down to it, I can be a teacher and somehow work my music on the side,” she says. “But I never really believed that. I knew I’d found my passion. I was on a mission.”

It would soon spell the end of Fritz. “It was tough… but it was fate,” says Nicks. “It was not going to happen for those five people. But what that did for Lindsey and I was prepare us in a way, to be on-stage in front of huge audiences standing next to each other.”

Buckingham and Nicks moved to Los Angeles together and began a romantic relationship that would last another seven years. While Buckingham worked on songs and demos at home, Nicks made ends meet working a series of waitressing jobs.

“Oh god, I was a terrible waitress,” she says. “I lied my way into all my waitress jobs. I had never worked anywhere. I didn’t even know how to open a bottle of wine. I just talked somebody else into doing it for me.”

In between shifts, Nicks was pouring out songs. “Going into my bedroom, lighting a candle or some incense, making it my sanctuary, and sitting on the floor, writing – that was my idea of a good time,” she says. “I’d take a poem, I wrote lot of formal poetry then, and get the guitar or eventually we got an old piano for free, and I’d put the songs together.”

After a year or so, Buckingham and Nicks secured a record deal with Polydor, and began work on their debut album with producer Olsen and a crew of top West Coast session players including guitarist Waddy Wachtel.

Wachtel: “Keith said to me, ‘I got a couple down from Northern California, you’re gonna love them. They’re great singers, really great writers, but the guitar player does everything by himself. He doesn’t know how to work with anyone else. I need you to play with him and get him used to playing with someone else.’”

Wachtel recalls Nicks as “a great singer, you could tell that right away. She was a lot more innocent then, perhaps. I guess we all were. But Stevie didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke, she hadn’t taken any of the drugs that almost ruined her life. All that came later.”

By the time the Buckingham Nicks album was ready for release in 1973, all involved were convinced the record would be a hit. When it flopped, and Polydor lost faith in the act, everyone was dumbstruck. “We couldn’t understand it,” says Nicks. “We felt we’d made the best album we could ever make.”

Unbeknownst to the band, the record was actually building a buzz in several southern markets, but the label didn’t see a future for the duo and dropped them. The pair began working on demos with Olsen for a second record that would never come to pass. Nicks still sees this as the ‘what if?’ moment in their lives.

“If we’d had a three-record deal, like everyone else did at the time, and had a chance to make another album, it would’ve been spectacular, and probably would’ve been a success,” she says. “If I was really the witch everyone thinks I am, I would’ve waved my wand and made that happen. That would have changed everything for us. That’s the only thing that could have really gotten in the way of Fleetwood Mac’s destiny.”

By late 1974, the latest incarnation of Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood and his longtime bassist partner John McVie, the latter’s wife, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, and American guitarist Bob Welch – had relocated from the UK to Southern California to be closer to their label, Warner Bros, and were coming off a reasonably successful album, Heroes Are Hard To Find, which had just made the lower rungs of the US Top 40.

The rest is rock history boilerplate. Fleetwood bumped into Olsen, who turned him on to Buckingham Nicks. Welch bailed and Fleetwood offered Buckingham his berth in the band. Buckingham agreed, on the condition that Nicks came too.

“Of course, I accepted those terms,” says Fleetwood, laughing, “and Stevie’s never forgiven me. All joking aside, it became very evident to Christine, John, and myself that the songwriting, the musicality of these two people, they came as one into Fleetwood Mac.”

For Nicks, joining the band brought the immediate benefit of a new best friend in Christine McVie. “I had a girlfriend who was five years older than me and fabulous,” Stevie says. “I loved her instantly. I had so much fun with Christine from the first moment and that never ended while we were together.”

In 1975, Buckingham and Nicks hit the ground running in Fleetwood Mac’s new line-up. “It was great,” says Nicks, “especially for Lindsey and I – we’d been flying by the seat of our pants for so long, barely scraping by. What happened was we immediately started getting paid. We got $250 a week, then $500 a week, then $800 – there was money everywhere in our place. I could actually walk down Ventura Boulevard and see a dress in a shop window and buy it. I had trained myself never to even look. So joining Fleetwood Mac, the whole thing was a like a huge dream come true.”

The dream of Fleetwood Mac would quickly grow beyond Nicks’ ability to buy some nice frocks. Propelled by relentless touring and hit singles in Nicks’ Rhiannon and Christine McVie’s Say You Love Me, their self-titled 1975 album climbed slowly, over 15 months, to Billboard Number 1. That would set the stage for the release in 1977 of Rumours, a record that would turn Fleetwood Mac into the biggest band in the world – selling 13 million copies at the time, on its way to the 40 million mark.

But the making of the album was accompanied by constant drama – as Buckingham and Nicks and the McVies broke up, and Nicks and Fleetwood later had a brief affair. “What we had to do during the making of Rumours was live in denial,” observed Buckingham in 2015. “We had to take all these emotions and conceal them all and get on with what needed to be done. There was no closure.”

Rumours’ songs famously mapped the topography of their writers’ relationships with exquisite, deceptively streamlined ache – and the songs kept those stories alive long after the protagonists wished them left behind. Nicks’ Dreams – with its instruction to an ex-lover to “listen carefully / To the sound of your loneliness” over a gently relentless groove – remains arguably the most exquisite of them all. It’s certainly, with over one and a half billion plays on Spotify, the most regularly revisited.

Today, reflecting on the much-dissected tumult of the era, Nicks is silent for a long moment. She sighs and offers simply that, “it was a lot to experience – and it all happened very fast. In a way, it still seems sort of unreal.”

“Every time we made a Fleetwood Mac record I’d have 20 songs left over,” Nicks told MOJO in 2013. “I’d be sitting at the piano and Christine would walk through and go, ‘Oh my God – she’s writing another song!’”

Yet it was Buckingham who took the creative lead on the Mac’s ambitious follow-up to Rumours.

Tusk was a huge statement spawned from Lindsey, and I sensed he needed to make it,” says Fleetwood today. “I knew that if I or the band suffocated his need to expand into different ideas, most likely he would’ve departed. So we made Tusk, and actually it’s one of my favourite albums to this day.”

But Buckingham’s control of Tusk would – in a sense – push Nicks towards a solo career, as she saw her own material pile up, unused.

“When you’re in a band with three writers and you do a record every two or three years… that’s not much for somebody that writes as much as me,” Nicks told MOJO’s Sylvie Simmons. “I think that Fleetwood Mac was terrified at first that I was going to go and just do the solo career.”

Today, Mick Fleetwood downplays any fears he may have had about Nicks’ other projects.

“The only reason it would’ve been a threat to the band is if we’d have said, ‘Stevie, you can’t do it,’” he says. “We were all so lucky to be doing what we were from the mothership known as Fleetwood Mac. I felt if the mothership couldn’t handle someone going solo, we’re done anyhow.”

In 1980, Nicks began working with (and later dating) producer Jimmy Iovine. Hanging around sessions he was producing for Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, she often joked that she wanted to become the sixth Heartbreaker. “Oh, she wasn’t kidding about that,” chuckles Benmont Tench. “She really did want to be in the Heartbreakers. But the band was complete.”

Instead, Nicks began working with Tench and various Heartbreakers – as well as members of the Eagles and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band – on a solo record.

“Fleetwood Mac was perfect for her,” says Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell. “But I think sometimes even with a band you love, you get to thinking, Maybe I could do something else outside of the group, maybe I could grow in the process.”

Tench worked with Nicks closely in assessing and arranging her songs. “I would go to Stevie’s condo in Marina del Rey,” he recalls. “We spent months going through these cassette tapes she had with song after song that Fleetwood Mac hadn’t cut. And I would sit at the piano with Stevie and [backing vocalists] Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, all singing, working them out. I was in heaven.”

The sessions would also reunite Nicks with Waddy Wachtel. “I got a call outta nowhere: ‘Jimmy Iovine wants you at Studio 55 to do a Stevie Nicks solo album,’” says the guitarist. “Stevie and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple years. They’d been working for months with Benmont and the girls. And she started laying out the songs, and it was really impressive. It was deep. When Edge Of Seventeen was presented to me it was like, Wow. Damn, Stevie.”

A feat of quintessential Nicks alchemy, Edge Of Seventeen combined a mystical meditation on the deaths of her uncle Bill and John Lennon, a story told by Tom Petty’s wife Jane Benyo about when the couple first met, and an ornithological snippet about the cactus-dwelling ‘white-winged dove’ that Nicks read on a flight from Phoenix to LA. To a copper-bottomed melody, it remains a testament to her craft and to her tenacity.

“I was scared, terrified, my solo record would be a failure,” she confides today. “So we worked on those [songs], practised with Benmont and the girls every night. By the time we got into the studio, I was well prepared. I was totally focused.”

Released in the summer of 1981, Bella Donna would go on to sell four million copies, spawn four hit singles (including duets with Petty on Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around and Don Henley with Leather And Lace) and hit Number 1 on the Billboard albums chart. The album represented a total triumph for Nicks – and, significantly, one outside of Fleetwood Mac and without Lindsey Buckingham.

“I lost a lot of productive years,” says Nicks today. “I could have turned out several more solo records, done more with Fleetwood Mac. There’s so much I can never get back from that whole time.”

A string of high-profile rock’n’roll romances – with J.D. Souther, Don Henley and Joe Walsh – also came and went, while her only marriage was a brief, grief-stricken union with Kim Anderson, the widower of her childhood best friend Robin, who’d died of leukaemia soon after giving birth to a son, Matthew. (Nicks would later put her one-time stepson through college and become “Grandma Stevie” to his children.)

But Nicks would never remarry or have children of her own. “In a way, I’m surprised I didn’t have a baby,” she says, adding that she ultimately chose her career, “and my music, and what I do.”

Through it all, Nicks continued to navigate the ongoing soap opera of Fleetwood Mac. She quit the group in 1991, four years after Buckingham had done the same. Yet it was as if the band’s gravity, and history, was irresistible, and a one-off performance at Bill Clinton’s Presidential inauguration in 1993 presaged a full re-formation of the Rumours line-up in 1997, followed by 2003’s Say You Will and lucrative tours (with Christine McVie flitting in and out of the band) over the next two decades.

The last great twist in the Fleetwood Mac story would prove fittingly dramatic. In 2018, the group was set to tour, essentially starting what looked to be a long, celebratory farewell run. But that January, during a high-profile Grammy/MusiCares event honouring the group, something went wrong between Buckingham and Nicks, who’d maintained an uneasy working relationship during the reunion years.

Reportedly, Buckingham groused that the band’s on-stage entrance was soundtracked by Nicks’ Rhiannon, while Nicks was apparently aggrieved that Buckingham was smirking during her speech. (Other versions put the schism down to conflicts over touring plans, with Buckingham wanting to delay the band’s dates so he could support a solo project.) Regardless, it soon became clear that Nicks was no longer willing to share a stage or a band with Buckingham. A few months later he was fired. Buckingham filed a lawsuit against the group, which was quickly settled – though recriminations in the press would continue for several years.

Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, still reeling from the death of his longtime collaborator/bandleader Tom Petty the previous year, was asked to take Buckingham’s place on guitar. “It was a strange vortex of circumstances,” says Campbell today. “My band had ended tragically the way it did, and Lindsey and Stevie had a falling out where they weren’t comfortable being on-stage.”

Campbell says it was Fleetwood who called with the offer to join the band, along with Crowded House’s Neil Finn, as part of an expanded touring version of the Mac. “I was still going through my grief and wasn’t sure,” says Campbell. “But I decided I’d do it and we had a beautiful two years touring the world. It helped me through my grief, and it helped get them through their issues with Lindsey. And it was a great band.”

Nicks says she’s especially proud of both Buckingham-free iterations of Fleetwood Mac. “When Lindsey left around [1987’s] Tango In The Night, we replaced him with Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, two great musicians and singers, and it was a really good, fun tour,” she says. “This last time we brought Mike and Neil and that went very well too. That worked because Christine and John and Mick and me, we threw our hearts into it.”

“It was all stunningly strange, because there wasn’t any lead up to it,” says Nicks. “We got a call, and I was going to rent a plane and go see her, but her family said, ‘Don’t come, because she may not be here tomorrow.’ And the next day, she passed away.

“I wanted to go there and sit on her bed and sing to her – which definitely would have made her pass away faster,” jokes Nicks, through tears. “But I needed to be with her. And I didn’t get to do that. So that was very hard for me. I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

Since McVie’s death Nicks has been adamant that she no longer considers Fleetwood Mac a going concern. “Without Christine, no can do,” she says. “There is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way. Without her, it just couldn’t work.”

Fleetwood Mac operated successfully between 1998 and 2014 largely without McVie, with her absence obliging Nicks and Buckingham to front the band in tandem. But, as Nicks explains, a détente between her and Buckingham – the two last crossed paths at a memorial service for Christine McVie in early 2023 – wouldn’t necessarily clear the way to a final tour.

For Mick Fleetwood, Nicks’ position on the band has left him at somewhat of a loose end (see side panel). As one who’s managed to navigate the politics of the group for nearly 60 years, Fleetwood says, with practised diplomacy, that the Mac deserves a more satisfying ending.

“It’s no secret, it’s no title-tattle that there is a brick wall there emotionally,” says Fleetwood of the impasse between Buckingham and Nicks, both of whom he stays in contact with. “Stevie’s able to speak clearly about how she feels and doesn’t feel, as does Lindsey. But I’ll say, personally, I would love to see a healing between them – and that doesn’t have to take the shape of a tour, necessarily.”

Fleetwood’s feelings echo what Buckingham told the New York Times in 2021. “I’ve known Stevie since I was 16, so I would like to think there’s a better way for us to finish up than we finished up. Not just for Fleetwood Mac and for the legacy, but just for the two of us.”

Stepping out in front of audiences remains in her blood and, with Fleetwood Mac’s future unclear at best, Nicks has been performing solo shows with a renewed vigour. Still, with more than two years off due to Covid, Nicks says she had to get into training.

“I went on the treadmill and danced to Halsey for six or seven months. Danced to I Am Not A Woman, I’m A God over and over until I got my mojo back,” she says, laughing. “Pardon the pun.”

Over the past year, Nicks has been moving between her own headlining shows and sharing stadium bills with Billy Joel. “I feel like I’m a better performer than I’ve ever been,” she says, “and maybe that’s because of the years we had off and were banished from the road. I certainly appreciate being able to go on-stage now more than ever.”

These days Nicks’ concerts are less elaborate productions, more deeply felt story sessions. “I just wear one cool outfit for the whole thing and tell a lot of tales,” she says. “I have a really good time putting my stories in and out of the songs. That part has been fun.”

The most dramatic change while touring has been a policy to protect herself from Covid by not socialising outside of her bubble. “I don’t get to see friends or hang out or go to dinner anymore, which used to be a big part of touring for me,” she says. “I don’t get to do anything now – except go on stage and put it all into the show.”

By her own reckoning, Nicks is also singing better than she ever has. Benmont Tench, who went on the road with Nicks in 2022, says her vocals are “astounding. She sings lower now, but it was really amazing to be on that stage and listen to her sing like that night after night.”

Mike Campbell notes that the quality of Nicks’ performance is no accident. “Stevie has a really strong work ethic,” he says. “She takes her voice seriously. She has her voice coach on tour who works with her every day. And she still sings great now because she works at it. She doesn’t just coast along.”

In terms of new music, Nicks released an emotional plea ahead of 2020’s US Presidential election called Show Them The Way (co-written with producer Greg Kurstin and featuring Dave Grohl) and a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth in 2022. But it’s been a decade since she last put out a solo album, something that may change soon.

“At the end of the pandemic, I finally started to write again,” says Nicks. “I’ve got this song about women’s rights that I think is really strong. And I wrote a song called The Vampire’s Wife, which is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It’s a story song, like Gypsy’s a story song, and Rhiannon’s a story song. So maybe that’s the beginning of an album.”

A big part of Nicks’ sets these days are tributes to fallen friends, including Petty and Christine McVie. “I do [Landslide] and we have beautiful video montage of me and Chris,” says Nicks. “I can never look at it, though, when I’m singing, because I’ll just get hysterical and sob. The world is a little bit of an empty place without her.

Although she’s lost several musical comrades, Nicks continues to find connection in her band, which includes decades-long collaborators Sharon Celani and Waddy Wachtel. “When I walk on-stage, I couldn’t be prouder of my band,” says Nicks. “I mean, I would rather not be freed up from Fleetwood Mac, because of Christine. But I’m in a place where I can concentrate on my solo work. I can do anything I want now and not have to worry about stopping and going back to Fleetwood Mac.”

At the same time, Nicks admits that “Fleetwood Mac is all over my set. Now that there is no more Fleetwood Mac, that opens the door for me to do other songs, like The Chain, that I’ve never done [in a solo show]. I will keep the music of Fleetwood Mac alive, for as long as I can.”

In the end, Nicks plans on carrying on as she always has. “To get up and dance and put on outfits and sing and tell stories, that’s what I’ve done since I was a kid, since I was a little girl,” she says. “I was doing that before I met Lindsey, before I joined Fleetwood Mac, and I’m still doing it. I don’t intend to stop.”

IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK/GETTY/ALAMY