Letting it go. Stevie Nicks revealed that she once encouraged Katy Perry not to get caught up in her “rivalry” with Taylor Swift.
“I always think of Katy Perry and I having this long talk at the Corinthia Hotel, in London … this is probably 10 years ago, and she said, ‘So, Stevie, who are your rivals?'” the former Fleetwood Mac member, 74, recalled during a Wednesday, February 16, interview with The New Yorker. “And I said, ‘I don’t have rivals.’ And her big blue eyes got bigger and bluer.”
She continued: “I said, ‘No, Katy, I don’t, and neither do you. You are Katy Perry, you’re who you are, you do what you do and you’re great at it. I’m Stevie Nicks, I do what I do and I’m great at it. We don’t have rivals. That’s just ridiculous.'”
During her conversation with the “Teenage Dream” singer, 37, Nicks advised her not to pay attention to the “Taylor Swift army” fighting with Perry’s fans over her feud with Swift, 32. “I was, like, ‘That’s just bulls–t,'” the “Dreams” singer recalled. “You have to just walk away from that. Don’t carry that around in your mind because then they’re winning this game.”
Tensions between the two pop stars first made headlines in 2014 when Swift told Rolling Stone that she wrote “Bad Blood” about a fellow musician who betrayed her. “She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies,'” the Cats star told the outlet at the time. “She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational — you would not believe how much I hate conflict. So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”
Perry shared her side of the story in May 2017, telling James Corden that the “All Too Well” singer “started” the feud. “I tried to talk to her about it and she wouldn’t speak to me. I do the right thing any time that it feels like a fumble,” she said during an appearance on Carpool Karaoke. “It was a full shutdown and then she writes a song about me, and I’m like, ‘OK, cool, cool, cool. That’s how you want to deal with it? Karma!'”
However, the “Roar” musician added that she was “ready for that BS to be done,” and hoped she and Swift could make amends. One year later, Perry sent Swift a literal olive branch and stated a desire to collaborate with the Valentine’s Day actress.
The pair officially buried the hatchet in June 2019 when Perry appeared in Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” music video.
“You know … we’ve been on good terms for a while,” the “Lover” singer explained at the time. “She sent me a really nice note and olive branch … like, an actual olive branch, to … the Reputation stadium tour awhile ago, and from that point on, we’ve been on good terms.”
Perry, for her part, felt her cameo sent a powerful message to their fans. “Even though it was difficult, it was important to make that appearance in the music video because people want people to look up to [us]. We wanted it to be an example of unity,” she told the Australian magazine Stellar in March 2020. “Forgiveness is important. It’s so powerful. If you can forgive your enemy, that’s amazing. As difficult as it is!”