(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks)
Mon 1 December 2025 16:30, UK
When anyone has been in the music world as long as Stevie Nicks has, they have to know when to pick their battles.
As much as Rumours may have been a nightmare to create, it was much better for her and Lindsey Buckingham to put their differences aside for the music rather than break up before the record even came out. They knew that their art was what mattered over anything else, but there was also a limit on how far someone should go to get their message out to the world.
Then again, it’s not like Nicks was ever afraid to speak her mind by any means. Throughout every single record she made, she preferred to let her songs do the talking half the time and let the chips fall where they may, whether that was talking about the baby that she gave up on ‘Sara’, paying tribute to her friend on ‘Gypsy’, or putting Buckingham in his place for treating her like trash when writing ‘Silver Springs’.
That kind of fire never exactly went out, either. Most artists of Nicks’s calibre would have either stopped making music by this point or tried to play it as safe as possible on their records, but even when working on Fleetwood Mac’s comeback album Say You Will, she was still willing to tell her perspective on current events like the 9-11 tribute ‘Illume’. But even if she spoke her mind, it was never maliciously at any point.
And judging by what went down between her and Buckingham, do you know how difficult that is? Anyone who wrote songs like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ about their other half would have usually been in for the ass-kicking of a lifetime, but Nicks knew to use her songwriting talents for good whenever she had the chance. There were repercussions, but no one realised that they may be risking their lives by playing music.
It would have been easy for Nicks to be invited for various charity shows if she wanted, but when looking at what Jackson Browne was doing for anti-nukes, she was practically shaking in her boots for him. When it comes to fighting those political battles, musicians can act with their hearts first, but Nicks felt that there was no way that she could have done half of the moves that Browne did during those shows.
Granted, he had a lot of people in his corner, but she felt that Browne needed to be around rather than becoming a rock and roll martyr, saying, “The world is in pretty bad shape, and it scares me. But I’m not one of those people, like Jackson Browne, who went up to the Diablo Canyon nuclear protest. I said to him, ‘But they could have broken your fingers-your beautiful fingers that write all those beautiful songs. Are you crazy? We need you to write songs. We don’t need you to be in jail.’ I would much rather be around to write the story than die for it and leave nothing behind. I believe you should put your talent where your talent is and stay out of the rest of it.”
It’s easy to admire the empathy that Nicks had for Browne at the time, but there’s a good chance that he eventually inspired her to turn her voice up as well. She was no stranger to the odd protest song, and even if she wasn’t around to play all of the various protest shows, she didn’t need to when she was writing everything from ‘Desert Angel’ during the Gulf War or in recent times when she wrote ‘The Lighthouse’ after the overturning of Roe v Wade.
So even if there are cases where Nicks drew a line in the sand, there was no way that fear was going to stop her from speaking her mind. She was willing to lay her artistry on the line if it meant sticking to her principles, and while it may have divided her fanbase on more than a few occasions, it didn’t matter as long as she got a message through.
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