Education Quote by Joanna Newsom

A year-long Fleetwood Mac obsession reads like a casual confession, but it’s really a tiny origin story: the kind musicians offer to make their artistry feel less like genius and more like appetite. Newsom frames it in the modest grammar of adolescence, when taste isn’t a curated identity so much as a possession. “Obsessed” is doing the heavy lifting here. It signals compulsion, repetition, living inside the same songs until they become a private weather system.

Fleetwood Mac, especially in their Rumours-era mythology, is a ready-made curriculum for a young songwriter: immaculate pop craft welded to interpersonal melodrama, harmonies that sound like friendship and betrayal at the same time. Newsom doesn’t name an album, but the cultural shorthand lands anyway. To be obsessed with Fleetwood Mac is to be schooled in how to make romantic chaos singable, how to wrap confession in polish, how to turn lived mess into communal chorus.

The high school detail matters because it softens any whiff of preciousness. Newsom is often received as baroque or “otherworldly”; this plants her firmly in the ordinary rite of passage of becoming yourself through someone else’s records. Subtext: her eccentricity has a pop lineage. She’s not outside tradition; she’s in dialogue with it, absorbing a band that mastered narrative and texture, then translating those lessons into her own strange, intricate language. It’s also a small act of permission-giving: intense fandom isn’t a phase to outgrow, it’s raw material.