“I’ve been saying that”: The lyric Stevie Nicks felt defined her later life
The art behind any good songwriter is crystallised in creating that single line that will resonate with people long after you’re gone. There’s a certain amount of passion that needs to go into any rock and roll song to be believable, but true artists like Patti Smith and Lou Reed have managed to leave pieces of their soul between the vinyl grooves. And for someone who treats lyrics as lovingly as Stevie Nicks does, she admitted that certain pieces of rock and roll history stick out much more than others.
Then again, there’s usually a time limit for when some people can identify with their lyrics. Although there’s bound to be some genuine hurt behind most of the songs on Rumours, it’s clear that Nicks has retired a lot of that anger and has been more content to make music that was more in tune with how she felt rather than dwelling on the drama that happened at one point in her career.
But going through her entire discography, she has always channelled every emotion she could into whatever she was working on. There are often tunes that talk about her genuine love of playing music, but there are also tunes like ‘Sara’ that show her conflicting feelings about losing her child or trying to communicate something much bigger than herself when making tunes like ‘The Lighthouse’.
When someone has been in the game for as long as she has, life’s goal tends to change a few times. Anyone would be completely fine with settling into retirement after making more money than they know what to do with, but after becoming one of the biggest female rockstars in the world, Nicks wants to make the most of the time she has with the rest of us.
And looking at many of the biggest names from her generation, it’s not like she doesn’t have good reason for thinking that. She knew that life would be better in her final years not having to deal with Lindsey Buckingham 24/7, and since she lost a musical big brother in Tom Petty, she felt that some of the best moments needed to be cherished in the same way that Mick Jagger talked about them on ‘Wild Horses’.
Despite being about a broken relationship, Nicks felt that Jagger’s lines about mortality defined what her past few years have been like, saying, “There’s a lyric from Mick Jagger that goes, ‘I have my freedom, but I don’t have much time,’ and I’ve been saying that to people over the past two or three years. I know everybody just thinks I’m the Energizer Bunny, but I’ll be 80 in eight years.”
But whereas Jagger was singing about the love of an old flame, Nicks took it as a profound statement for anyone facing down their own mortality. Most of us can only hope to do some living after we die, but Nicks wants to make sure that she is able to embrace the moments that she still has on this Earth as well.
Granted, the love angle behind the lyrics might not be an accident, either. Nicks may have had many different romantic encounters throughout her life, but if there was one true love of her life that towered above everything else, it was music, so finding her life’s mission in a lyric wasn’t that far off the beaten path for her.
