Stevie Nicks is elevating her voice as soon as once more.
The rock legend launched a brand new pro-choice anthem “The Lighthouse” — her first new unique solo observe in 4 years — on Friday, Sept. 27.
“Don’t shut your eyes and hope for the perfect / The darkish is on the market / The sunshine goes quick / Till the ultimate hours,” she sings. “Your life’s modified ceaselessly / And all of the rights that you simply had yesterday / Are taken away / And now you’re afraid / You need to be afraid.”
Nicks wrote the heavy, atmospheric track in 2022, after the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade that June, eliminating the constitutional proper to abortion.
“I discover it very unhappy, at 76 years outdated, I needed to see Roe v. Wade taken away,” Nicks tells PEOPLE solely in an e mail interview. “Two years in the past, after I realized the results of girls’s rights which are vanishing, I watched a variety of information, and I used to be like a sponge — it simply went into me.”
Following the information, the Grammy winner and Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame inductee channeled that unhappiness into track.
“One morning I awakened… which, I by no means write after I get up within the morning, and impulsively went, ‘I’ve my scars, I’ve my scars,’ so I simply grabbed my pocket book, and I began writing the entire thing,” she says. “It was a long-form poem, and I did not know what sort of track that may be. I discovered an instrumental that I liked and inside two or three days, I had recorded the track. I by no means redid the vocal — it is an unique vocal — and it is taken me two years.”
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Ever since, the Fleetwood Mac alum has been fine-tuning the observe, working with some A-list collaborators alongside the way in which.
“This track has traveled round; it has been within the fingers of many producers, of many musicians, of many individuals which have helped with it. Sheryl Crow, bless her, got here in and was such a assist with the manufacturing. Dave Cobb did the unimaginable classical guitar chords and was the primary producer I labored with on the track,” she says. “I’ve been touring solidly for 2 years, so the entire time, we have been engaged on this track. I by no means thought it might take two years to get it to the purpose the place it was excellent.”
The subject of girls’s reproductive rights is a private one for Nicks, who in 2020 revealed to The Guardian that she “would have needed to stroll away” from Fleetwood Mac if she did not get an abortion in 1979. With out the process, “I’m fairly certain there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” she added on the time.
Now, she tells PEOPLE, “All of the tales that we inform in regards to the necessity for ladies’s healthcare and the need for a protected and authorized abortion choice for ladies is completely needed.”
Nicks wrote the observe on Sept. 26, 2022.
“It appeared like in a single day, individuals have been saying, ‘What can we, as a collective power, do about this…’ For me, it was to jot down a track,” she stated in a press release. “I’ve typically stated to myself, ‘This can be an important factor I ever do.’ To face up for the ladies of the USA and their daughters and granddaughters — and the lads that love them. That is an anthem.”
Nicks — who has two remaining dates of her newest tour — is about to carry out on Saturday Night time Reside for the primary time in 41 years on Oct. 12.
