From the time he launched his 2024 presidential campaign to the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump proudly touted that he “killed Roe v. Wade.” Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices killed more than Roe; it has killed women. Americans across the nation have spoken out about the reversal of the landmark ruling — which stood for half a century. Now, in the infancy of the second Trump presidency, one woman is in a unique position to make her voice heard.
Legendary rock-and-roll songstress Stevie Nicks released her newest single on Sep. 27, 2024. “The Lighthouse” is Nicks’s visceral response to the reversal of Roe, and her decision to release it less than two months before the presidential election seems far from random. In a post on Instagram, the “Edge of Seventeen” singer shared, “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 all the men that love them.”
Stevie Nicks gained stardom in the mid-1970s as a lead singer and songwriter for legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac. Alongside her back-and-forth lover Lindsey Buckingham, best friend Christine McVie, and the band’s famed Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, Nicks molded some of music’s brightest and most timeless moments. The band’s 1997 live recording of “Silver Springs,” for example, is still a staple in popular culture. Fans flock to hear the 76 year-old Nicks perform other Fleetwood Mac classics like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” and “Gold Dust Woman” to this day.
While she gained notoriety for her storytelling capabilities and powerfully-vulnerable vocals, Nicks is no stranger to overtly-political music. In 2020, she released “Show Them the Way.” This wordy, convoluted epic surely would have found itself alien in most artists’ discography, given its unique composition that lies somewhere between a fever dream and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In “Show Them the Way,” Nicks repeatedly references being “ready for the Kennedys” and walking with the apparition of Martin Luther King Jr. While beautiful, the song failed to reach broad audiences outside Nicks’s devoted fanbase, who have come to expect the unexpected from the icon, from a “Twilight”-inspired album to a tambourine-wielding Barbie. In her live shows over the last couple of years, the rock icon seized the chance to make a few pointed political plugs: urging fans to vote before a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth,” and dedicating the original song “Soldiers Angel” to the Ukrainian troops fighting off Russian invaders.
Cognizant of Nicks’s interest in domestic and foreign politics, the subject matter of “The Lighthouse” comes as no surprise. The song — produced, in part, by acclaimed singer-songwriter (and close personal friend of Nicks) Sheryl Crow — opens with a robotic synth-toned rhythm that is, thankfully, short-lived. The nature of its brevity is welcomed when Nicks’s incomparable incantation pierces the prologue.
The song commences with the reflection, “I have my scars, you have yours / Don’t let them take your power” and is an immediately-refreshing divergence from Nicks’s past political messaging in “Show Them the Way.” The plain rhythm of the backing track provides a pedestal upon which Nicks’s refined voice and songwriting can be fully imbibed. The words are simple; they should be. It shouldn’t take a complicated thought process to reach consensus: We must all fight for the rights of our fellow humans. Silence is the privilege of the unaffected and the uncaring.
The introductory sequence speaks of a shadowy “they” who seeks not only to strip women of their reproductive rights, but to “take your power” in full. Against the backdrop of contemporary political divisions, it is not difficult to imagine whom this “they” is in reference to (the party leaders who orchestrated the implosion of Roe come to mind). Nicks goes on to compel her listeners to be afraid — because “everything [she] fought for, long ago in a dream, is gone.”
Stevie Nicks was 25 when Roe v. Wade was decided, and six years later, as Nicks has come to share, the singer had an abortion herself. She credits her and her bandmates’ success to the procedure: Without it, she says, “I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac.” Her personal stake in the matter makes her wording all the more poignant. Everything she fought for, everything she came to know as the way of a nation, everything she came to rely on as a young woman is gone.
The chorus of “The Lighthouse” marks Stevie’s transition from faux vocal fragility to sonant strength. While she utters the same phrases in the chorus that she does in the tune’s beginning, the melody takes on a new feeling altogether. Nicks’s initial vocalization provides for a somber, fear-drenched atmosphere where listeners are left helpless, scared, powerless. Her vocal power in the chorus, however, compels listeners to mold that fear into anger and direct that anger toward change. Where there was despair, the path of power is illuminated, and Nicks has one message for listeners: “get mad.”
The legendary lyricist positions herself as an elder figure in the zeitgeist of social change, and she all but spells out the mechanism through which contemporary actors can hope to reclaim the rights they had not so long ago.
“I wanna be the lighthouse / Bring all of you together / Bring it out in a song / Bring it out in stormy weather / Tell them the story / I wanna teach ‘em to fight / I wanna tell ‘em this has happened before / Don’t let it happen again.”
The song stresses the time-sensitive nature of Nicks’s call-to-action, the pace of which has been quickened in the wake of Trump’s second inauguration. If there was ever a time to fight hard and consistently for human rights, it is now.
In and of itself, “The Lighthouse” is a well-written, vibrant song. And it has not gone without recognition, being voted the best new song on Billboard. “The Lighthouse” has also been received positively among independent critics and the folks at Rolling Stone. Its lyrics take on new lives when one considers the personal history of the woman who penned it. Stevie Nicks has remarked that she does not particularly care if the new single is a hit. Her calling is to speak out, and she has certainly done that.
In the age of AI-generated music, the role of songwriters in social activism cannot be underestimated. Music has moved us for centuries, and it will live on long after each of us has shuffled off this mortal coil. Ultimately, “The Lighthouse” is no “Rhiannon” or “Nightbird.” Its lyrical and musical arrangements are simple, repetitive, and lacking in the storytelling richness that first made Stevie Nicks a star a half-century ago. For these same reasons, though, the song is masterfully executed. This is no gilded romance. This is not supposed to be the kind of song included in some autumn vibes playlist on Spotify. This is about human rights, about the complicity of Americans in their sisters’ deaths. As Stevie notes, “This is an anthem.”
Associate U.S. Editor
