The greatest protest lyric ever written, according to Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks doesn’t really strike anybody as being the most politically minded songwriter of her time.
There are many times when she could speak her mind, but whenever she spoke from the heart, it was usually about looking at the friends around her or telling off Lindsey Buckingham for breaking her heart halfway through the recording of Rumours. She wore all her feelings on her sleeve, but she always felt that certain lines had a certain magic to them as soon as she heard them leap out of the speakers.
And it’s not like she didn’t have a lot of those herself when she was making classics. Even if no one could understand a word she was singing on ‘Rhiannon’, you could hear her getting more and more impassioned every single time she started working on the song live, almost like a spirit was possessing her throughout the length of the song. But even though Buckingham was the more vicious one, Nicks’s observations could be a lot more heartfelt.
‘Silver Springs’ might have been the real casualty of Rumours, but when you hear the song in context when she played it with Buckingham years later, you could tell that it was still one of the most meaningful lines she had ever written. She wanted Buckingham to feel that song in his chest every single time he sang it with her, but when she ventured outside of her own relationships, there was a lot more for her to explore.
‘The Lighthouse’ was already a signal that she was willing to turn her voice up in her older age, but even on Say You Will, her forms of protest were a bit more subtle. ‘Illume’ is one of the most emotionally gripping songs she has ever made following the attacks on 9/11, but instead of talking about using music as a way to fight against oppression, a lot of her protest songs were merely calling for tolerance on both sides.
That’s not always what each side wants to hear, but Nicks knew that the music was what was going to bring people together. After all, that’s what it was supposed to do during the days of the Vietnam War, and John Lennon wrote ‘Give Peace A Chance’. But when looking at the greatest poets that the rock scene has ever produced, Nicks still felt that no one had managed to do anything more powerful for rock and roll than Bob Dylan did when he wrote.
But when singling out his best lines, Nicks felt that his greatest protest lyric was in ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, saying, “When I think of actual protest songs, the song that runs through my head is Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ ‘There was music in the cafes and revolution in the air.’ I was just losing my head the first time I heard ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ Which was a long time ago, before there was ever a political bone in my body. But I understood that he was very political and that just everything he wrote was touched with some politics.”
While that entire album has more to do with Dylan working through his troubled marriage and the heartache he feels over it falling apart, that one image does invite a lot more charged imagery than what he may have intended. Those cities where music is in cafes and revolution is in the air was what Nicks was always striving to reach, and even when she became one of the biggest stars in the world, she seemed to want to use her music to enact real change in the world wherever she could.
She didn’t want to divide her fanbase right down the middle, but it was never a matter of her trying to be the voice of reason every single time she sang. Everyone was susceptible to having their own point of view changed, but Nicks felt that she had done her job if she made people think about something a little more closely by the time one of her songs was finished.
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