The two Fleetwood Mac songs Stevie nicks refuses to sing: “I can still hardly listen”
Stevie Nicks has always been a performer who has squeezed every drop of her humanity into her performances. While approaching it with some form of spirituality, it’s always grounded deeply in her emotions and a defiant sense of principle. Ultimately, it was her honest storytelling, along with Lindsey Buckingham’s, that made Rumours such a compelling album.
Nicks is fearlessly devoted to her art, and if Rumours told you anything, it’s that she seemingly deems no subject off-limits. Particularly if it came at Buckingham’s expense. But on their 2003 album Say You Will, her ex-partner penned a track she deemed too dirty to sing.
“I asked her to sing on the song, and she wouldn’t. I think she thought it was dirty,” Buckingham said of the song ‘Come’. Nicks hasn’t in fact confirmed whether there is any truth in that accusation, however in her defence the song a rather straightforward telling of sex without any real narrative nuance and doesn’t make for intriguing listening.
“That tells you something about someone who has been a rock icon but, in some ways, is still quite a conservative person,” Buckingham said. “And I don’t see her as someone who has lived her life very conservatively. So, there’s an interesting dichotomy there,” he finished, in his scathing take on Nicks’ decision to abstain from singing on the track.
Despite her devoted honesty to her art, the story of ‘Come’ showcases a woman who lives by a staunch code of integrity. Ultimately, Fleetwood Mac’s discography rarely engages with anything political and controversial, focusing their gaze internally for the most part. Therefore, Nicks’ principles are rarely tested outside of ‘Come’—but there is one song from the same album that, as time has passed, has proven too difficult to perform.
“It seems like yesterday,” Nicks said when thinking about the tragedy of the World Trade Centre in September of 2001. She was staying at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and preparing for a show in the Big Apple when arguably America’s biggest tragedy struck.
“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,” Nicks recalled in a memorial post in 2020, remembering that day. “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”.
It inspired the writing of ‘Illume (9-11)’ which was featured on the 2003 Say You Will album. In that same year, Nicks said: “I’ve never been a political person, but suddenly, I felt like I was in the middle of history”.
While in the city to perform a show, Nicks was confronted with the fact she had to continue on and perform: “I was almost hysterical. All my songs suddenly seemed to be about 9/11”. That string of shows led to the writing of ‘Illume (9-11)’ which, to this day, Nicks has never been able to perform: “I have never been able to sing it on stage,” she said, “I can still hardly listen to it 19 years later.”
