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Listen to Stevie Nicks’ powerful new female anthem 'The Lighthouse'
27 September 2024, 13:17
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She said the song "might be the most important thing I ever do."
That's because Stevie Nicks has written her new song 'The Lighthouse' about the overturning of women's ownership of their own reproductive healthcare rights.
Inspired by the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn the 1973 landmark Roe vs Wade ruling on 24th June 2022, the former Fleetwood Mac singer has issued a call-to-arms for all women, in the US and beyond.
In a statement released alongside 'The Lighthouse', Nicks said: "I wrote this song a few months after Roe v Wade was overturned.
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"It seemed like overnight, people were saying ‘what can we, as a collective force, do about this…’ For me, it was to write a song."
The song marks Stevie Nicks' first new music since her 2022 cover of Buffalo Springfield's anti-Vietnam War anthem 'For What It's Worth'.
Watch the music video to 'The Lighthouse' - which focuses on Nicks dressed in black inside a lighthouse as a storm rages outside in the dark, cutting away to feminist protesters from different eras - below:
Stevie Nicks - The Lighthouse (Official Music Video)
Further talking about the atmospheric anthem's origin, Nicks said: "It took a while [to write the song] because I was on the road.
"Then early one morning I was watching the news on TV and a certain newscaster said something that felt like she was talking to me - explaining what the loss of Roe v Wade would come to mean.
"I wrote the song the next morning and recorded it that night. That was September 6, 2022.
"I have been working on it ever since," she continued. "I have often said to myself, ‘This may be the most important thing I ever do.’
"To stand up for the women of the United States and their daughters and granddaughters - and the men that love them. This is an anthem."
The US Supreme Court's decision to overrule the Roe vs Wade sent shockwaves through the music world, with stars like Madonna, Bette Midler, Taylor Swift and Pearl Jam all denouncing the action.
Stevie talked to People magazine for the release of 'The Lighthouse', saying she wrote it when she "realised the consequences of women’s rights that are vanishing."
"I find it very sad, at 76 years old, I had to see Roe vs Wade taken away. Two years ago, when I realised the consequences of women’s rights that are vanishing, I watched a lot of news, and I was like a sponge - it just went into me.
"One morning I woke up… which, I never write when I wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden went, ‘I have my scars, I have my scars,’ so I just grabbed my notebook, and I started writing the whole thing," she added.
"It was a long-form poem, and I didn't know what kind of song that would be. I found an instrumental that I loved and within two or three days, I had recorded the song. I never redid the vocal - it's an original vocal - and it's taken me two years."
In 2020, Nicks told The Guardian that she "would have had to walk away" from Fleetwood Mac had she not been able to get an abortion in 1979.
"I'm pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac," without the procedure she added.
The topic of female's reproductive rights is an incredibly personal one to the Grammy Award winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.
Nicks - who has no children herself - continued: "All the stories that we tell about the necessity for women's healthcare and the necessity for a safe and legal abortion option for women is absolutely necessary."
