Stevie Nicks is a legendary musician whose career has spanned over six decades. She rose to fame as the lead vocalist and composer for Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s and later went on to be known for her solo work. On the other hand, Harry Styles, the 29-year-old musician, has come to define a completely different era of music and constantly pushes artistic boundaries. Given their very different musical genres and almost fifty-year age gap, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac and Harry Styles of One Direction seem, on paper, to be about as mismatched as two musicians could be.
But as it turns out, the children of Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood were the ones who introduced Harry Styles to Stevie Nicks. In a 2015 interview with the Mirror , Fleetwood stated, “I took my two 13-year-old daughters and their mates to see One Direction, and that point, the girls are going, ‘Dad, just don’t embarrass us! No dad-dancing!'” Seeing as how Fleetwood and his children were able to meet Harry Styles backstage after the event because of his fame, the kids thought he was “a superstar” when they learned that Styles and the rest of One Direction were enormous fans of Fleetwood Mac.
According to what Nicks subsequently revealed to the Daily Mail , Fleetwood invited Styles to a Fleetwood Mac concert at London’s 02 Arena. That was the first time that Styles and Nicks really met one another, and it was the beginning of a friendly relationship that has only strengthened over the years.
When NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly spoke to Harry Styles about Nicks and how he felt working with “someone who was the soundtrack of your childhood”, he replied, “Every time I’m with her, you want to be, obviously, present, right? I’m trying to enjoy being with her and soaking in. But I think at the same time, while you’re in the room with her, I’m sitting there thinking about being 10 years old and singing the song.” When addressing the moments that ‘mean the most’ to him, he recalled the day when Stevie and Styles performed together at the Troubadour. He said in the interview, “When we first played together, it was at the Troubadour — famously, where Elton John did his first U.S. show — and it was an amazing moment, but my favorite was soundchecking. It’s like four people in there and just us singing in the empty Troubadour. For me, that’s a moment that I’m going to hold on to.”
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In the year 2019, as reported by Vogue , when inducting Nicks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Styles said that the 72-year-old was “everything you’ve ever wanted in a lady, a lover, in a friend.” Nicks described him as ‘the son she never had’ and her ‘love child’ with fellow Fleetwood member Mick Fleetwood in interviews. Styles won her approval after performing a rendition of The Chain on every night of his first solo tour.