The Stevie Nicks songs inspired by ‘Wuthering Heights’: “There are some wild words”

Posted On February 16, 2026February 16, 2026

To most music fans and extremely casual literary fans, Kate Bush is the inspiration behind Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic Wuthering Heights, such is the power of the track. Bush’s singular song adaptation was a number one hit in the UK in 1978 and remains one of her most beloved tracks. But she wasn’t the only artist who wrote songs based on Wuthering Heights.

The book is back in the collective consciousness as Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi take on Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of the fabled tale. That it has been routinely ragged on in the reviews of critics is nothing but a mere hurdle in the movie’s undoubted expectations to deliver massive box office sales. The power of the two leads feeding each other their own body parts in the trailer was enough to confirm that.

But the truth is, the story has had a hold over anyone who has read it for years now. Its depiction of wild and, sometimes, worrisome love has a habit of enrapturing audiences and inspiring other artists. As such, the book has been routinely used as the root inspiration for some truly brilliant pieces of work in the pop and rock world.

From Genesis’ ‘Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers’ to Death Cab For Cutie’s ‘Cath’, generations of musicians have taken Brontë’s classic work and created music out of it. In that tradition, Stevie Nicks found inspiration in the novel as well.

For the title track to her 1983 album The Wild Heart, Nicks pulled from her love of Wuthering Heights and her connection to New York. Whether she was trying to pull a fast one or just speaking metaphorically, Nicks claimed to have been born in the East Coast state during a 1983 interview just before the release of the parent album.

“It was born in New York, and it’s just intense. There are some wild words in it that just sort of popped up,” Nicks claimed. “I think that people are gonna love ‘Wild Heart.’ It’s the one song that I go back to time to time again and listen to. There’s something about the vocal that just gives me shivers because it’s just so real. People will understand that, probably more than a lot of other things, because it definitely takes you through your nervous breakdown and through your recovery, and it takes you through your survival.”

“And everybody’s heart is wild, so it’s not like I’ve got any kind of hold on it, ’cause this entire album was written for everybody and their wild heart,” she added. :This was very much meant to be shared and given to people to have them just love the idea that they have wild hearts ’cause I love that — I love that.”

For Nicks, the love of Wuthering Heights didn’t come from Brontë’s book. Instead, Nicks discovered the story through a film adaptation of the book. When Nicks wrote the accompanying booklet notes to the 2016 reissue of The Wild Heart, she didn’t specify if she was inspired by the 1939 film adaptation starring Laurence Olivier, the 1970 adaptation starring Timothy Dalton, or one of the many television adaptations over the years.

“I’d written ‘Wild Heart’ early on. I remember singing it during a Rolling Stone cover shoot for Bella Donna,” Nicks wrote in 2016. “And I wrote it completely and utterly about the movie Wuthering Heights. I wrote it about Heathcliff and Cathy, and the fact that they were one person, that they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be separate, and about the power and the drama of the closing death bed scene… All those amazing things he says to her.”

Check out ‘Wild Heart’ down below.