Rock and roll icon Stevie Nicks released a new abortion-rights anthem on Friday. Nicks wrote “The Lighthouse” shortly after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.
“I find it very sad, at 76 years old, I had to see Roe v. Wade taken away,” Nicks told People magazine, adding that she found herself absorbing a ton of media coverage after the decision. “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 said.
On the song, Nicks sings:
Don’t close your eyes and hope for the best / The dark is out there / The light is going fast / Until the final hours / Your life’s changed forever / And all the rights that you had yesterday / Are taken away / And now you’re afraid / You should be afraid.
In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Nicks opened up about having an abortion at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s popularity in 1979.
“If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” she told the outlet. “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, there are 22 states with abortion bans, 14 of which have near-total bans. It has forced many ob-gyns out of practice, stymieing important health services for women, and has led to worse maternal mortality rates in states with strict bans.
Nicks says that although she initially wrote the song in 2022, the song took some time to finish. She enlisted fellow musicians, such as Sheryl Crow, who contributed backing vocals on the song as well as guitar and bass tracks.
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