Olivia Rodrigo closed out her inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival on August 30 with a very special guest: Stevie Nicks, who joined the pop star for a moving performance of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”
Rodrigo had already brought out Alanis Morissette for “Ironic” and Sarah McLachlan for “Building a Mystery” and “Angel” during her festival-closing set. But the biggest surprise came when Rodrigo briefly left the stage, then returned hand-in-hand with Nicks.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Stevie Nicks!” Rodrigo announced as the crowd erupted.
The two then performed “Landslide,” accompanied only by longtime Nicks collaborator Waddy Wachtel on acoustic guitar. They traded vocals on the verses before joining together in harmony on the chorus, giving the Fleetwood Mac classic a striking cross-generational resonance.
For Nicks, “Landslide” has always been a deeply personal song. She wrote it in 1973, when her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham was under strain and she was beginning to wonder whether her lifelong dream of a music career would ever come true.
Nicks and Buckingham had traveled to Aspen, Colorado, where Buckingham began rehearsals for a one-month tour with the band of former Everly Brothers singer Don Everly. Buckingham expected the job to provide enough money for the couple to get by for a while, but Everly ended the tour early.
Buckingham returned to Aspen frustrated and angry. After a fight with Nicks, he took her car and left her there.
With help from her parents, Nicks bought a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Distraught, she went to the home of their friend and producer Keith Olsen.
“She sat on the couch crying that she and Lindsey had had this fight,” Olsen recalled. “I got my guitar out and handed it to her and said, ‘Go in the bedroom and write about it.’ And that’s what she did. I fell asleep on the couch.”
Alone in Olsen’s bedroom, Nicks found herself thinking about the mountains she had just left behind.
It meant the whole world could tumble around us and the landslide would bring you down.”
— Stevie Nicks
“When you’re in Colorado and you’re surrounded by these incredible mountains, you think ‘avalanche,’” she later explained. “It meant the whole world could tumble around us and the landslide would bring you down.”
The song came quickly. When Olsen awoke, Nicks played him the new composition — one that would eventually become one of Fleetwood Mac’s most enduring songs after Buckingham and Nicks joined the group in 1975.
But “Landslide” was about more than the uncertain future of Nicks’ relationship with Buckingham. She was also confronting the possibility that the music career she had dreamed about since childhood might never happen.
That uncertainty found its way into one of the song’s most poignant lines: “Even children get older, and I’m getting older too.”
Years later, Nicks explained the song’s significance in the liner notes to Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks.
“I wrote ‘Landslide’ about whether or not I was going to give it all one more chance,” she wrote. “You know the rest of the story.”
The rest of the story included Fleetwood Mac, whose arrival would transform Nicks’ career. “Landslide” became one of the group’s signature songs and, more than five decades after Nicks wrote it, remains a meditation on uncertainty, change and the fear of watching one version of your life disappear.
At Daisy Chain Fields, Nicks seemed to recognize something of her younger self in Rodrigo.
“She reminds me of me, when I was her age a hundred years ago,” Nicks told the crowd after the performance. “And I’m somewhat awestruck that she could do all this. Because it’s so hard, you have no idea, putting this [festival] together with all of these people. And she’s done it, with this grace.”
Rodrigo created Daisy Chain Fields in the spirit of the ’90s Lilith Fair, bringing together artists including Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Chappell Roan and Garbage. Net proceeds from the festival supported organizations advocating for women and girls, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood and the National Women’s Law Center.
