Every now and then (not often) a song comes along that just takes your breath away the moment you hear it.  You file it away under “best ever” and it haunts you the rest of your life.  You’re walking along the beach and that same melody comes drifting across the sand from an outside cafe.  Or you hear another artist cover it and you think “I like the original better”.  But it’s always out there somewhere, lurking and waiting to pounce – bringing back perhaps bittersweet memories or just a reminder that you used to be younger.  “Landslide” is just such a song.

Stevie Nicks wrote this during a time in her life when she wasn’t sure what direction to go.  She and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham were having trouble in their relationship and Polydor Records had dropped their album BuckinghamNicks.  Stevie visited a friend in Colorado (Aspen, of course) and wrote the lyrics while taking in the beauty of the state through a living room window.  Years later in an interview, she commented, ” looking out at The Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us…. at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways”.

Buckingham and Nicks went on to join Fleetwood Mac and vaulted the band to the top of the charts with Rumors – the best album of all time.  This song has been performed at every one of their concerts since then and we do it on every job ourselves.  Since there isn’t any keyboard part, I cue up the sequence for Karen, then  I go sit in the crowd and listen to her perform it… still takes my breath away.