Stevie Nicks turns 78 today, and a new book is using 50 songs to trace the arc of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist’s life and career. Annie Zaleski’s Stevie Nicks in 50 Songs, published by Running Press, tells that story through tracks that shaped Nicks over more than 50 years.

The book reaches back to 1955 with Red Sovine and Goldie Hill’s “Are You Mine” and moves all the way to Taylor Swift’s 2024 track “Clara Bow,” placing Nicks in a musical line that stretches across generations. Along the way, it spotlights the songs that defined her as a solo artist and as part of Fleetwood Mac, including “Rhiannon,” “Dreams,” “Gold Dust Woman,” “Sara,” “Leather and Lace,” “Gypsy,” “I Can’t Wait,” “Talk to Me” and “Planets of the Universe.”

For Zaleski, the project grew out of a lifelong connection to Nicks’ work. She said she has been a fan since the 1980s, and recalled that Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango in the Night stayed with her as a child. “Everywhere” was the song that hit her first, she said, adding that she even taped it off the radio and kept the ending fading out because she liked it so much.

That kind of devotion is part of why the book reads less like a catalog and more like a personal map. Zaleski said she wanted to write something centered on Nicks’ music, and the finished book is built around that idea, mixing song-by-song writing with archival images of Nicks over the years and sidebars on her fashions, collaborations and friendships, causes and place in pop culture.

The format matters because Nicks has not only survived the eras she helped define, she has kept finding new ones. Zaleski said, “Stevie and Fleetwood Mac have been with me through my entire life,” and that endurance is the point of the book: Nicks’ voice, image and songwriting have remained part of the culture as tastes changed around her. Zaleski also pointed to the writing itself, saying Nicks’ lyrics are “so poetic and so vulnerable,” and that there is “a reason why she wrote some of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits, because she knows how to make poetic pop songs.”

The question the book answers is why Nicks still matters now. On her 78th birthday, the answer is not nostalgia alone. It is that her songs still sit at the center of pop memory, still travel well across decades, and still give listeners a way to hear how one artist can be both deeply personal and widely lasting.