Taylor Swift praises Stevie Nicks

[David]

I watched this and it gave me the warm fuzzies all over. Maybe I’m getting soft. Hearing Taylor tell a stadium the size of a city all about Miss Nicks and put the camera on her seems like an extraordinary way for the hottest music act today to reach out publicly and turn the attention of all those kids on a long-ago idol. It’s a bridge from the present to the past and back to the present again. It rises way above cringe and becomes a pretty profound statement. Other hot acts grab bits of old classics and fold them into hip hop without paying any sort of articulated respect — it’s like picking at old carcasses. But Taylor puts the camera on this old woman and tells tens of thousands who she is and how much she means to Taylor herself, and it’s totally believable.

It kinda reminds me of when the brilliant young white hooligans in Fleetwood Mac went to Chess in Chicago to record and mix and revere the black blues and soul greats. It’s not that Stevie is Otis Spann or Willie Dixon but that she is Taylor’s musical predecessor and Taylor knows it.