Stevie Nicks Feels Connected to Marie Antoinette Through the ‘Tragedy’ She’s Experienced
When Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, she leaned into excess after years of living as a struggling artist. Years later, she saw herself in an unexpected historical figure: Marie Antoinette. She explained that she felt connected to Antoinette in several ways, including tragedy. She also believes that in a past life, she died in a manner similar to Antoinette.
Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac after years of struggling as a musician.
While Nicks was in college, she joined a band with former high school classmate Lindsey Buckingham. The band, Fritz, did moderately well, opening for acts like Janis Joplin. Despite this, a record producer suggested that Nicks and Buckingham would have better luck as a duo. They left the band and moved to Los Angeles together but struggled to find success.
In order to support them, Nicks picked up multiple jobs while Buckingham worked on music at home.
“I’d get home at six [P.M.], fix dinner and straighten up, ’cos they’d been smoking dope and working on songs,” Nicks explained, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “Then from nine to three [A.M.], I’d join Lindsey on the music. Then I went to bed, got up, and went to my waitress job.”
She said that she feels a connection to Marie Antoinette
Once she joined Fleetwood Mac, Nicks’ financial struggles ended almost immediately. She vowed that she’d never check another price tag in her life. The rest of the band also leaned into excess. They hosted lavish parties, ordered expensive champagne, stayed in luxurious hotels, and snorted heaps of cocaine.
Reflecting on this period of her life, Nicks can draw parallels to the last queen of France, Antoinette. She noticed this while watching the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette.
“I went to see that film the other night and it reminded me a lot of myself and the people surrounding me when we first started with Fleetwood Mac,” she said, per the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters. “The clothes and the champagne and how young they all were — and it really touched me. Because we were young too and there was a tragedy for all of us also, just in what it did to all of our lives and taking them out of ‘the real world,’ as Tom Petty would say.”
Stevie Nicks also believes that she was beheaded in a past life
In a much more direct sense, Nicks feels connected to the French monarch because she believes she was “put to death, like Marie Antoinette” in a past life. According to the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours by Zoë Howe, Nicks holds a firm belief that she was decapitated in a former life. Because of this, Nicks has difficulties leaning her head back and exposing her neck.
She shared that she can’t lean her head back in a hair salon and refuses to do so in music videos. On one video shoot, the director had to “call in a back-up singer to do it. I called her my stunt neck.”
