Stevie Nicks Just Dropped An Abortion Rights Anthem
We have no choice but to stan.
Living legend and be-caped fashion icon Stevie Nicks has graciously blessed us all this fine day with a brand new jam — and it is a song about abortion rights!
In a post on Instagram, Nicks explained that she wrote the song, “The Lighthouse” after Roe was overturned, because she needed a way to fight back.
I wrote this song a few months after Roe v. Wade was overturned. It seemed like overnight, people were saying “what can we, as a collective force, do about this…” For me, it was to write a song.
It took a while because I was on the road. Then early one morning I was watching the news on TV and a certain newscaster said something that felt like she was talking to me~ explaining what the loss of Roe v. Wade would come to mean. I wrote the song the next morning and recorded it that night.
That was September 6, 2022. I have been working on it ever since. I have often said to myself, “This may be the most important thing I ever do. To stand up for the women of the United States and their daughters and granddaughters ~ and the men that love them.
This is an anthem.
Nicks is backed up by Sheryl Crow, who also co-produced the song, on guitar and vocals. I am going to choose to believe that this is in some way her way of making up for having done that one song with Kid Rock.
The video itself features Stevie Nicks dramatically swanning around a dark lighthouse looking like a glamorous witch, like she does, interspersed with images of abortion rights protesters and historical feminist images.
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
Don’t close your eyes and hope for the best
The dark is out there
The light is going fast
Until the final hours
Your life’s forever changed
And all the rights that you had yesterday
Are taken away
And now you’re afraid
You should be afraid
Should be afraid
Because everything I fought for
Long ago in a dream, is gone
Someone said
The dream is not over
The dream has just begun
Or
Is it a nightmare
Is it a lasting scar
It is unless you save it
And that’s that
Unless you stand up
And take it back
And take it back
It’s actually kind of interesting that Nicks’ newer songs — like her 2020 releases “Show Them The Way” and a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” have all been so political, given that Fleetwood Mac was notably pretty apolitical back in the day (apart from “Don’t Stop” being Bill Clinton’s campaign theme song) — which I think is part of why, at that time, a lot of “serious” music people kind of saw them as being too commercial or whatever. My mom once explained that it took her a while to appreciate them because they were what “straight” people were into at the time (a term she kind of used like we use “basic”), which shocked me because I was 17 and completely obsessed with Rumours at the time.
Allow me to leave you with the best of all possible Fleetwood Mac jams, “Silver Springs.” Because we deserve that today.
Here’s hoping that we kill the filibuster and make abortion rights the law of the land, and that you all someday get your own temperature-controlled cape rooms, or whatever your version of a temperature-controlled cape room is. (Mine is a temperature-controlled cape room)
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Well. More power to Nicks. And if this moves the needle with even one old witchy woman, I'm happy.
That said, I frequently find myself disappointed in lyrics that have an opportunity to be better. Take this bit:
============
Is it a nightmare
Is it a lasting scar
It is unless you save it
And that’s that
Unless you stand up
============
Note the double use of "unless". Unless is a reversal word, and like any double negative, it risks returning you to the status quo ante.
It's a lasting scar ==> unless you save it (when it will not be a lasting scar) ==> unless you stand up (when it will be a lasting scar again).
The funny thing is that without the intervening, "And that's that," it could have simply been repetition for emphasis instead of a double negative. Consider this:
============
Is it a lasting scar
It is unless you save it,
Unless you stand up
============
In this case the standing up is a continuation of the previous line, a suggestion for HOW to "save it". But the original interposes the line, "And that's that."
============
It is unless you save it
And that’s that
Unless you stand up
============
The middle line here creates finality, which is the OPPOSITE of continuation. Now it is unnatural to read standing up as the continuation and clarification of saving. A new status quo is established, and so the "unless" -- the negation -- applies to the new status quo, returning us to the older status quo, the status quo before the saving began.
I am no million dollar lyricist, and I am certainly no singer. But to me there's way too much focus on making something sound cool and not enough on making lyrics actually mean something. it's not hard to create a line that works with your anthemic refrain of saving ourselves and standing up against harmful power. The song's name is "The Lighthouse". Okay, so I have problems with associating "dark" with threat and evil b/c of how racism has used that association over the centuries, but I admit that it's a common trope and is used in context where few people other than I would object. So let's go ahead and take the "dark" metaphor seriously as something the Lighthouse needs to oppose. Drop it in your lyrics in place of the problematic phrase and you get this:
============
Is it a nightmare,
A dark and lasting scar?
It is unless you save it.
The dark wins,
Unless you stand up
============
Now it scans the same way, same syllables, same stresses, but "nightmare" is associated with sleep and night and thus with dark, the scar is associated with dark through direct description but also because scars are often (not always) but often darker than the tissue around them. The imagery works, is what I'm saying.
Only now not only do you have a consinstent metaphor ringing multiple times, but the "unless" in each of your two anthemic lines of power both oppose that darkness instead of accidentally opposing each other.
Personally, I would also use "heal" instead of "save" (remember "scar" was in the original, I just made the scar "dark" I didn't insert the scar imagery) because healing is more directly opposite to scarring, but that's just me. Pop music does a lot of weird mixing of metaphors. Generally I think the strongest work takes its metaphor seriously and works it consistently throughout the piece rather than constantly changing metaphors along the way, but it's impossible to argue honestly that mixing metaphors is bad per se, given that so many popular and well-reviewed pieces of modern music do just that. So the save/heal switch we can consider entirely optional and a valid stylistic disagreement.
But that double "unless" is just a monstrosity. Objectively so.
Anyway, more power to Nicks, but I have got to start getting myself gigs consulting on lyrics before pop music comes out.
Now that's a lovely thing.
To borrow a phrase from BLM activist Kimberly Jones: "Men are lucky that women want equality, and not revenge."