The emotional Fleetwood Mac song Stevie Nicks refuses to sing: “I was almost hysterical”
It doesn’t seem like anything would shake Stevie Nicks. It’s clear that an emotional song never rocked her. Nothing was ever so personal that it deterred her from putting it down into lyrics and confronting it head-on, even with the very people she was writing about in the case of Fleetwood Mac. But as an event far bigger than her found its way into her work, the weight of what she was singing about became too heavy to handle.
It’s not the first time that real-world events have floated into Stevie Nicks’ world. Her biggest solo anthem, ‘Edge Of Seventeen’, was written in the wake of one of music’s biggest tragedies and a moment that terrified the entire industry. “That was a very scary and sad moment for all of us in the rock and roll business, it scared us all to death that some idiot could be so deranged that he would wait outside your apartment building, never having known you, and shoot you dead,” Nicks said about the assassination of John Lennon.
“The white dove was John Lennon and peace,” she said of the track, forever seeing that song as a memorial to his legacy and a battle cry for a better world. But she was never scared to sing that one as it remains a key part of her set.
But as things got worse and violence and tensions in the world reached a fever pitch two decades later, Nicks both couldn’t ignore what was happening, and also couldn’t find the strength to sing it.
“It seems like yesterday,” Nicks said. The day in question was September 11th, 2001. Nicks was in New York for a show, staying at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, only a few miles away from the Twin Towers, where tragedy would strike in one of the most devastating days in American history.
“Looking down from high up in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at 7:30 on the morning of 9/11 at a sea of yellow cabs, thinking about going out to enjoy the beauty of New York, deciding to go to sleep for a few hours, and then go out. The next time I looked out of that same window, it was totally gray. No sign of life. My assistant didn’t wake me until after the second plane hit, and the world changed,” Nicks recalled in a memorial post in 2020, remembering that day.
It’s a day that’s haunted her since. In 2003, she said, “I’ve never been a political person, but suddenly, I felt like I was in the middle of history,” remembering the panic and the fear that surrounded her.
Despite it all, she had a show to do. “I was almost hysterical. All my songs suddenly seemed to be about 9/11,” she said as the rest of the tour was tainted by horror and upset. In an attempt to process it all, she sat down and wrote a song purposefully about it, ‘Illume (9-11)’.
Sitting on Fleetwood Mac’s seventeenth and final studio album, Say You Will, it is a beautiful song and a poignant tribute. But after they recorded it, it was too hard ever to do it again. “I have never been able to sing it on stage,” she said, “I can still hardly listen to it 19 years later.”
