“It lives on and reminds you”: the one Fleetwood Mac song Stevie Nicks can’t perform
Even though Stevie Nicks penned some of Fleetwood Mac’s most emotionally raw and vulnerable tracks, her enduring reputation as the ‘High Priestess of Rock’ often ties her more closely to the band’s mystical, character-driven numbers: ‘Gold Dust Woman’, ‘Rhiannon’, and ‘Sisters of the Moon’, to name a few.
Throughout her career, Nicks has wrestled with the dichotomy between her ethereal stage persona and the flawed, deeply human songwriter she is behind the curtain. Perhaps no moment captured that duality more poignantly than the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, which inspired Nicks to write the haunting and reflective track, ‘Illume (9-11)’.
By random chance, Nicks had just arrived in New York City on that September morning in 2001, following a show the previous night in Toronto. So, when the World Trade Center was attacked, the moment was unfolding not just on her television—as it was for much of the world—but outside her window a few miles away.
“It seems like yesterday,” Nicks wrote on Facebook in 2020, on the 19th anniversary of the attacks. “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 grey. No sign of life. My assistant didn’t wake me until after the second plane hit, and the world changed.”
At that moment in time, Nicks was in the middle of a North American tour supporting her solo album Trouble in Shangri-La. She’d been struggling with voice problems throughout the tour, and now, she didn’t see how she could possibly carry on. However, encouragement from family and fellow musicians and the positive signs of unity she was seeing across the country inspired Nicks to continue the tour just a few days later.
“The love and camaraderie and determination of everyone to help was so strong that you could feel it in your blood,” she recalled in 2020. “Gathered around the TV, my small team and I watched George Bush stand on that huge pile of debris and spiritually reach out to all of us to try and give us hope in a hopeless situation. I cried. The city cried. The grey sky was crying. But we didn’t feel beaten. We had this illusive thing in our hearts called hope. Hope is everything. The lack of hope is devastating. The opposite of hope . . . is nothing. When I got home six weeks later, I wrote a song called ‘Illume’.”
‘Illume (9-11)’ would eventually appear on the final Fleetwood Mac album, Say You Will, in 2003. But whilst the song certainly delves into the trauma and loss of that infamous day, the music isn’t mournful in the way one might expect. The song has a churning rhythm led by an acoustic guitar strum and feels much more like a determined march through the rubble than a collapse into grief.
It’s a song that, even 23 years later, would likely be quite moving and powerful to hear live. As of yet, though, it’s not one that Stevie Nicks has ever put on a setlist, whether with Fleetwood Mac or in her solo shows.
“I have never been able to sing it on stage,” she concluded in 2020. “I can still hardly listen to it. The thing about a song is, it lives on and reminds you, in detail, what happened.”
