Abigail recommends “Landslide”, as covered by The Smashing Pumpkins
It’s true that timing is one of art’s great mysteries. There’s no explaining it, no guessing who governs it. All I know is that every now and then, a song comes on the radio just for me. Maybe God is an algorithm; maybe God is a radio DJ; maybe God is something in between. This has to be why I’d never come across The Smashing Pumpkins’ cover of “Landslide” before this year, even though I’d heard the original version countless times before. It’s funny how reintroduction can inspire a closer look at something you’ve always known.
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“Landslide” was originally recorded by Fleetwood Mac in 1975. It both is and isn’t a love song—it’s a little about Stevie Nicks’ romance with Lindsey Buckingham, maybe also about her father, but mostly about the strange, winding path of her career. Nicks had been working as a housecleaner and a waitress; she and Buckingham had just been dropped by Polydor Records, and their way forward was murkier than ever. “Landslide” is a time capsule of a moment in Nicks’ life when she considered giving up on her dream; the song marks her decision to keep going. It was the decision.
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In any creative field, rejection is often painfully quantifiable. There’s a point at which the stream of no’s can move beyond simple disappointment and become something more elementally shifting. Failure might begin to reorient your very understanding of who you are. After all, if you are driven by the desire to make art that connects with others, reflecting the human experience in a way that makes people stop and think Oh, yes, I’ve felt that too—what does it mean if your work never reaches its audience? Is it enough to create in a void, simply for yourself?
Every failure can feel like a crossroad. For so many artists there are no blueprints, no timelines, no guarantees. There is only a continuation—the decision, every day, to keep going—and this is what I hear in The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Landslide.” Stevie Nicks’ realization at a turning point in her own life collides with Billy Corgan’s profound recognition of the same feelings nineteen years later.
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The Smashing Pumpkins’ cover was released as a B-side in 1994, which means I could have heard it at any point in the last twenty-eight years but it did not come into my life until this one, arguably at the moment I needed it most. It feels important to me that Corgan created new beauty from something he’d fallen in love with; a lot of my own writing operates on the same mechanisms. I take the emotions I feel or the things I observe and I turn them into art—or I try to, anyway. When something moves me I want to turn around and share it with the world. There are seasons of doubt—of course there are. But I guess I’ve never known another way to live.
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I can see now that “Landslide” was a promise Nicks made to herself almost fifty years ago—one that Corgan renewed in 1994. The decision to believe that art matters, even in the face of a world that might increasingly say otherwise. The idea that persevering in spite of it all might be a radical act. Certainly a necessary one.
At the time, Nicks couldn’t possibly have known that her work would still be reaching new listeners half a century later. That she was about to join the band that would change her life forever. That they would become one of the best-selling groups of all time. She had no way of knowing any of this. On that day, she was alone with her thoughts and a view of the mountains. Her guitar, a piano, and a choice to make.
We can’t know the future. There are no blueprints. But instead of giving up, Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide.”
Abigail Oswald is a writer whose work predominantly examines themes of celebrity, crime, and girlhood. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, DIAGRAM, Split Lip, and elsewhere, and her short fiction was selected for Best Microfiction 2021. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, lives in Connecticut, and can be found at the movie theater in at least one parallel universe at any given time. More online at abigailwashere.com.
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