Here on a bright Sunday evening in California’s Central Valley, a musical approach to one of the more-important matters of our nowadays: abortion.
And yet, too, with a new voice from an ancient, iconic wonder, Stevie Nicks.
Nicks has been a crush of mine for near-about 50 years. In the 1970s, however, she had to share space with my other ‘crushes’ — Diane Keaton, Olivia Newton-John, Carol Kane, Linda Ronstadt, etc., etc. — and those first couple of Fleetwood Mac albums from the 1975/’87 period (“Fleetwood Mac,” “Rumours“) made/left a mark on my rock-song agenda forever. Sadly, not much of a follower in the ensuing years, just listening to radio play.
Now she’s using her music to create a platform in defense of abortion and women’s rights. She had an abortion in the 1970s and pushing back against the Roe V Wade reversal-shit, Nicks wrote/produced a new song, “The Lighthouse,” supposedly the first in more than a decade.
Although I missed it originally, she performed the song on SNL a couple of weeks ago:
I have my scars, you have yours
Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power
Unless you stand up and take it back
Try to see the future and get mad
It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time to get it back
Further on the subject and in more detail, Nicks was interviewed by Rolling Stone, published last Thursday — the piece behind a strong paywall — so for ease, excerpts for free via the Guardian this morning:
Nicks at the time had a contraceptive intrauterine device but nonetheless became pregnant with singer Don Henley after breaking up her prior relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, she told Rolling Stone. She said she decided to terminate the pregnancy in about 1977, or going into 1978, as Fleetwood Mac sat atop the world after its album Rumours.
Rumours won Fleetwood Mac the Grammy for album of the Year in 1978, a year that saw the band play 18 live shows in 11 US states. Three of the album’s singles – Go Your Own Way, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun – reached the top 10 on the charts. Dreams, with Nicks’ vocals, went No 1 as Rumours eventually finished seventh on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
“Now what the hell am I going to do?” Nicks said to Rolling Stone about her thought process at the time of her aborted pregnancy. “I cannot have a child. I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years.
“So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn’t do that to my baby. I wouldn’t say I just need nine months. I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band period.”
Nicks, 76, said she doesn’t “really care” if people become upset with her over having decided to get an abortion. “My life was my life, and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade,” Nicks said to Rolling Stone, adding that Fleetwood Mac would have been “done” if she had decided otherwise.
And today, Nicks appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, noting: ‘“Everybody kept saying, ‘Well, somebody has to do something. Somebody has to say something. And I’m like, ‘Well I have a platform. I tell a good story, so maybe I should try to do something.’ I was also there. I was, ‘Been there, done that … We are the women that can tell all these young women from 15 up to 45 … We are that light that goes out, and we bring the ships in so they don’t crash. We save lives every day. The way I feel about this upcoming election is that Kamala Harris is the lighthouse, too.”‘
Right on! Full interview (well worth a watch):
Coincidentally, this morning, I came across an old Nicks favorite, hadn’t heard in ages, and in tandem with the before-mentioned Don Henley — she seemed to not hold grudges or other awkward feelings, either (great h/t Susie):
Stevie a crush still, or not, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman [La Femme qui pleure],’ found here)