Singer Stevie Nicks has released her first solo single in four years, and it’s an ode to abortion.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Nicks said she wrote “The Lighthouse” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. “I find it very sad, at 76 years old, I had to see Roe v. Wade taken away,” she said. “Two years ago, when I realized the consequences of women’s rights that are vanishing, I watched a lot of news, and I was like a sponge — it just went into me.”
She said she spent the last two years writing and perfecting the song. “One morning I woke up… which, I never write when I wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden went, ‘I have my scars, I have my scars,’ so I just grabbed my notebook, and I started writing the whole thing,” she continued. “It was a long-form poem, and I didn’t know what kind of song that would be. I found an instrumental that I loved and within two or three days, I had recorded the song. I never redid the vocal — it’s an original vocal — and it’s taken me two years.”
In a sad statement to how extreme her pro-abortion activism is, Nicks said the song could be the most important thing she ever does.
“All the stories that we tell about the necessity for women’s healthcare and the necessity for a safe and legal abortion option for women is absolutely necessary,” she said. In a statement published on X, she further added, “It seemed like overnight, people were saying, ‘What can we, as a collective force, do about this… ‘”
She added, apparently missing the irony of discussing generations to come when referring to killing our posterity, “For me, it was to write a song. 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.”
In the lyrics, Nicks sings about losing “everything I fought for,” how a nightmare has begun, and how women should be afraid.
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
Ultimately, what Nicks is saying women need to be powerful is the ability to kill their own preborn children. And the notion of women needing to have abortion to be successful is not only wrong, but grossly misogynistic… yet it’s still an idea that Nicks has frequently promoted.
Nicks previously spoke about her own abortion, saying there would have been no Fleetwood Mac had she not killed her preborn child, who she said she would have named Sara — and who was the inspiration for the Fleetwood Mac song.
When Nicks got pregnant, she was dating Don Henley, one of the founding members of the Eagles. “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” she said. “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.”
She’s also further insinuated that there were not only more abortions, but that — far from being something that gave her power — they strongly affected her; in a 1992 interview, she said, “To give up four babies is to give up a lot that would be here now. So that bothers me, a lot, and really breaks my heart. But they’re gone, so… .”
