Stevie Nicks has released a forthright new single, The Lighthouse, inspired by the fight to reinstate abortion rights in the US.
Nicks wrote the robust, swaggering rock song in the aftermath of the June 2022 decision by the US supreme court to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that Americans had a constitutional right to abortion.
“It seemed like overnight, people were saying, ‘What can we, as a collective force, do about this?’” Nicks said. “For me, it was to write a song. It took a while 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. 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.”
In the song, Nicks casts herself as the titular lighthouse, guiding women to campaign for their rights. “I want to teach them to fight / I want to tell them this has happened before, don’t let it happen again,” she sings.
The chorus is similarly a call to action: “They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back / Try to see the future and get mad / It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had / And you don’t have much time to get it back.”
Nicks is backed by Sheryl Crow, who plays guitar and bass as well as singing backing vocals. Crow also co-produced the song with 13-time Grammy winning Dave Cobb.
The Lighthouse has been released amid a US election campaign where abortion access has been at the forefront of campaigning.
Trump installed the supreme court justices who overturned the decision during Joe Biden’s presidency, and has boasted about it: “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” he said in May. In August he said he had “no regrets” about the court decision, saying: “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. It’s being solved at the state level and people are very happy about it.”
Kamala Harris has repeatedly criticised Trump on the issue, characterising him earlier this week as “the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they, rightly, should be able to make about their own body and future”.
With abortion law now decided at a state level, 14 states have banned abortion with another 11 described as “hostile” to it by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Research published this month by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health found that doctors are being forced to provide substandard care by making women take unviable pregnancies to full term.
Nicks, 76, has been using her music to focus on civil rights struggles in recent years. Her one-off track Show Them the Way, in 2020, was inspired by watching documentaries about the civil rights movement and has Nicks imagining performing at a political benefit attended by Martin Luther King Jr, John Lennon, John F Kennedy and others. She followed it with a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, which was originally inspired by clashes between police and young people over LA curfew laws, and became synonymous with the anti-Vietnam war movement.
The Lighthouse is a rare entirely new song for Nicks, whose last album of brand new material was 2011’s In Your Dreams. She followed that with new recordings of earlier demos, 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault, in 2014.
She has continued to tour in recent years, including in a co-headline tour with Billy Joel in 2023 and 2024. She will be the musical guest on the 12 October edition of Saturday Night Live, where she is likely to perform The Lighthouse.
While her new song certainly rebukes Trumpism, Nicks has not explicitly endorsed Harris. Instead she has called for people to register to vote, and in a recent Instagram post she alluded to Swift’s endorsement of Harris, writing: “As my friend Taylor Swift so eloquently stated, now is the time to research and choose the candidate that speaks to you and your beliefs.” She signed off “childless dog lady” in a nod to Swift’s own characterisation of herself as a “childless cat lady”, JD Vance’s derisive description of US Democrats.
