The song that reduced Stevie Nicks to tears
Stevie Nicks’ discography is not only full of musical greatness but also a treasure trove of emotions. From her early days in Buckingham Nicks through her Fleetwood Mac years and into her solo work, her lyricism has always pulled from the deepest corners of herself, articulating tricky feelings and personal memories in her songs. It’s no surprise that performing them each night brings up a lot of emotions, with one song even bringing her to tears.
When considering what track that might be, it feels like there’s a whole long list of options. Her song ‘Landslide’ has always been an incredibly emotional one, first as an anthem for her own growth and now sung in memory of her lost friends and bandmates. ‘Silver Springs’ has also prompted some emotionally charged performances as the lyrics deal with the end of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham. In her solo work, plenty of her songs, like ‘Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You’ or ‘I Still Miss Someone’, feel deeply personal and evocative of an emotional moment in time.
But the song that stands out to Nicks is one that she’s rarely performed. “Over the last several years, I pulled out a song from [Trouble In] Shangri-La to end my set that is called “Love Is” which I had never done on stage before,” she told her fans during a Facebook Q&A.
The 2001 track closes out her sixth solo album. As the lyrics roll on, the track deals with the tender end of a relationship, grappling with both the reasons for it ending, the excuses often given to the other person and the heartbreak they’re left with.
“Do I know you cannot stay? / I know,” she sings, recounting images of crying on the floor after a lover leaves and pining for the memory of their kiss and their heart. Of all of Nicks’ heartbreak tracks, ‘Love Is’ feels like the most literal. It places her right there in the immediate moment of a break up, as if she’s borrowing from a specific memory for the right words.
“That song, I thought was a real super special song to do live,” she said.
However, ‘Love Is’ is by no means one of Nicks’ most popular songs. Instead, perhaps the beauty of the track lies in its specific yet widely relatable content. To know love is to know heartbreak. It is impossible to get through life unscathed by heartache, and the experience of a failed relationship is one that the majority can relate to, at least in some way. While the images held in the lyrics feel personal to Nicks, the scene they paint is one that many people know or remember all too well, able to connect the track to their own experiences of upset and hurt.
“Something about it caused a connection where the audience, and almost me were in tears when I would sing that song!” Nicks continued. As if feeling that link between her own heart and the hearts of her audience members, ‘Love Is’ seemed to create a uniting moment between the singer and her crowds as a beautiful reminder that no one is ever truly alone in their experiences and no person is an island. There are always ties that bind us, whether that be these specific scenes of heartbreak or the broadly relatable feelings of upset that the track holds.
