‘Illume’: The song Mick Fleetwood called a sequel to ‘Gold Dust Woman’
Most artists trying to make a sequel to their greatest work is usually tempting fate. No one was waiting for The Beatles to make a sequel to Sgt Pepper, and judging by how Who’s Next turned into one of the best albums The Who ever made, it was probably for the best that Pete Townshend kept Lifehouse on the backburner until things died down. But Stevie Nicks had an overarching approach to her work, and that meant some familiar characters coming back into the mix after a while.
Then again, Nicks was never looking to write full novels within the span of a few minutes. Half of her greatest works with Fleetwood Mac came from her channelling her inner pain out into the world, and it’s hard to get in the same headspace she was when she was in her 20s when approaching her 50s.
And since her solo career was taking off around the 1980s, she was practically living two separate artistic lives. Her volatile relationship with Lindsey Buckingham was always going to make ‘The Mac’ a more democratic process, but there was a spark in songs like ‘After The Glitter Fades’ and ‘Edge of Seventeen’ that wouldn’t have existed if Buckingham had been looking over her shoulder.
So when the band started coming back together after a long time away for Say You Will, it was going to be a massive undertaking. Everyone on the album had to be represented fairly to get everything to work, and while that made for a record that could be bloated in some spots, there are still moments where Nicks hits some of the rawest nerves of her career. Since this was 2003, all things have circled back to 9/11.
Even though Nicks was shellshocked like the rest of the world, she knew the only way for her to cope was to write a song about her problems, which morphed into the track ‘Illume’. Although Nicks envisioned it as a personal song, Mick Fleetwood knew that somewhere in that tune was a ghost from the past waiting to bust out.
When talking about the album, Fleetwood remembered catching hints of the Rumours era in that song, saying, “The groove for “Illume” is incredibly simple, and she was like: ‘Is this any good? Is it doing enough?’ I said, ‘In my opinion, Stevie, this is all about you; this is your modern-day ‘Gold Dust Woman.’’ It has that Edith Piaf element coming through; that thing where the singer’s relationship with the lyric is incredibly personal and powerful.”
And listening back to it, there are subtle hints at that old witchy tone in the track. ‘Illume’ already has themes of wanting to heal from tragedy, but since ‘Gold Dust Woman’ was always about finding that light in the darkness in the 1970s, this was the chance for Nicks to use that sixth sense she had for when that pain became frighteningly literal.
But that was the beauty of Say You Will half the time. Even though not every emotional wound had properly healed, every member knew that they weren’t making an album strictly for themselves. They had begun writing tracks that were meant for their fans to internalise, and that sometimes meant making songs that cut deeper to the bone than others.
