Social media and various commercials insist that “we’re all in this together” and that if we just bake enough sourdoughs and go on enough therapeutic walks, we’ll all be okay. But the truth is that this pandemic has sucked. It has sucked for you, it has sucked for me, and it has sucked for Stevie Nicks, who as always, isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times, Nicks explains that, at 72, she’s terrified the virus is going to come for her and her voice, ruining her ability to continue to do what she does best:
“I have put a magical shield around me, because I am not going to give up the last eight years — what I call my last youthful years — of doing this,” she vows. “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.”
In addition to being “bored and depressed” with touring on hold, she’s also suffering from the death of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, enough so that she posted about the justice on social media. She then made the mistake of reading the comments, fixating on one poster who ignored what she’d written about Ginsburg and instead dredged up the infamous interpersonal drama that will haunt Nicks and her band, Fleetwood Mac, for as long as they both shall live:
“They didn’t even care about what I had written about Ruth and went right to the breakup of Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re talking about the death of a great Supreme Court judge, and you are yelling at me about something that happened two-and-a-half years ago? What are you, insane?’ I’m reeling from it. But I’m also like, OK: I can never be on social media.”
Ruth may have shuffled loose her mortal coil, but Nicks, of course, is a strong believer in the afterlife. She explains that shortly after her mother died in 2012, Nicks contracted a head infection. She began “pounding” Diet Gatorade for the electrolytes, but then started suffering from acid reflux.
“It was burning up my chest and my throat,” she says. “And all of a sudden, I felt this little tap on my shoulder and heard my mom go: ‘It’s the Gatorade.’”
Similarly, if she’s having trouble finding something, she’ll often invoke her mother to help her find it.
“It’s so real and creepy, and I always just go ‘Thank you, Barbara.’ I sometimes feel I have more of a relationship with my mom since she’s been dead than I did before she died.”
Despite this connection to the spirit world, Nicks doesn’t seem to have any plans to summon otherworldly beings to help sway the most important election of our time, which I must say seems like a waste. If your dead mother can help you find a missing earring, maybe it’s worth asking her to rally her other ghost friends to stop America’s descent into fascism?
Sadly, Nicks won’t even say who she’s voting for. “As we get closer to the election, I probably will state who I am for,” she says. “But not now. Well—I’m not for Trump, so that’s that.”