Stevie Nicks reveals how a Taylor Swift song helped her grieve Christine McVie: “It helped me a lot to let her go”
Stevie Nicks has opened up about how a Taylor Swift song helped her to connect to Christine McVie after she died, saying, “It helped me a lot to let her go”.
The Fleetwood Mac vocalist was speaking to The New York Times as Swift has been honoured as one of the publication’s ‘30 Greatest Songwriters’, and selected one of the singer’s most poignant tunes as helping her to process the loss of McVie.
“You ask about her brilliance. I can only say, ‘If only I had written it’. For me, this song will always live in my heart,” Nicks said, before reciting the lyrical tagline to Swift’s ‘You’re on Your Own, Kid’: “You’re on your own kid — You always have been.”
The song, taken from Swift’s 2022 album Midnights, reflects on the challenges, fears, and confidence encountered in one’s newfound independence, something that Nicks deeply resonated with, given that she lost McVie that same year.
“I feel that her song is generational. I think it’s all of her relationships written into one song — a little bit of this, a little bit of that — and dropped into my lap,” Nicks said, adding, “It makes me cry for both of us — what we lost, what we learned and how we survived.”
The singer went on to explain how the song helped to connect her to Swift, in the context of McVie’s death, one month after its release.
“The title of the song is something Christine would have said to me after she passed away — and I felt it came through Taylor,” Nicks emotionally reflected. “It helped me a lot to let her go.”
Nicks had opened up about the impact of ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’ in the past, speaking about it to the crowd at one of her shows in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2023. “Thank you to Taylor Swift for doing a thing for me,” Nicks told the audience. “That is writing a song called ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’. That is the sadness of how I feel.”
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