Frankenstein vs. the World

I love Dottie’s guided tour through the Stevie Nicks archive on YouTube. As always Dottie’s effortless insight and ability to cut right to the (wild) heart of things is startling and impeccable. My favorite parts are where she talks about the video above, where she compares Stevie’s voice to both Chanel No. 5 & a family of crocodiles, and where she talks about Stevie being OK being stupid in an interview on CBS. I think it’s an important thing, to be OK being stupid (don’t I know it).

Watch this short clip in which Nicks supposedly talks about her songwriting.  It’s hilarious how she suffers the stupidity of Rita Braver in that interview, who seems to have no clue about her music or even what to ask her, so she just lets her ramble on about her permed 80’s hair. I love how unafraid Stevie Nicks is to say nothing of substance at all. She does say something interesting though about her songwriting in the beginning—that she gets inspired a lot by everyday things and she’ll write a line down and start a poem (I think it’s cool how she thinks of her songs as poems). She seemed to indicate also that there are lots of lines that don’t become poems, that are just random lines floating in the ether. I respect this kind of quotidian freedom of hers to create beauty out of seemingly nothing at all.

Tags: dorothea lasky, stevie nicks