Say You Will Tour / Keyboasrdists Michael Dean & Michael Bernard

[David]

Originally Posted by secret love

Anyway, never mind that Stevie Nicks wrote the guitar for Leather and Lace and Landslide, and the piano for Lady From the Mountains and Rhiannon.

I think it's vague to say she wrote the "guitar" or the "piano" for such-and-such song because that implies that she wrote the guitar or piano part(s) that we all recognize from the recording. But that's not true in the case of Landslide and Rhiannon. She wrote the lyrics and the vocal line, supplied the main chords, and accompanied herself on those demos. There's a big difference.

She must be horrible.

Not horrible. She's a great singer and performer, and many people believe a great songwriter. She is not an instrument player in any memorable sense.

Note a subtle difference here: she WROTE the music for these four songs, no, she did not record the instruments herself, true, but she was in the room with: Don Henley, and separately Lindsey Buckingham and Dave Stewart, telling them what to play and how to play it - they arranged it their own ways, sure, but she wrote it.

I think you're confusing a couple of different things here. She did not tell Lindsey Buckingham what to play - unless you mean supplying him with the basic chords and singing the song to him so he got the feel. (A chord is a chord, and a part is a part - they're not synonymous.) She certainly didn't tell him how to play a modified Travis-style finger pick, and that's what Landslide is. She completely lacks the expertise on guitar to have arranged that part. The guitar part that we hear on the track is LB's work, not hers. In some cases, her demos may have given the rest of the band an idea of what sort of instrumental part to create. For example, the Smile at You piano from 1982 sounds like Christine playing something a little more upscale from something Stevie probably played for her - same thing with Sara. And we've already all heard about how Dreams (FM7 - G) developed when the others got their hands on her idea and fleshed it out. Even a great pianist like Bittan riffed on Stevie's simple figure on the piano - on How Still My Love, for example. But there are plenty of other occasions - Rhiannon is one of them - where the guys playing the instruments had to invent the various parts because they weren't there before.