Stevie Nicks doesn’t have many regrets, but waiting until 70 to vote is one of them

Malia Mendez | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

Stevie Nicks was on the edge of 71 when she cast her first ballot.

Waiting that long, the Fleetwood Mac alum said Wednesday on MSNBC, is one of her only regrets in life. It’s also one she’s spoken openly about at her solo concerts over the last two years, she said.

This election cycle, Nicks said, she hopes her fans don’t make the same mistake.

“You can say, ‘Oh I didn’t have time,’” she said, but “in the long run, you didn’t have an hour? You didn’t have an hour of your time that you could have gone and voted?”

And “if you’re going to vote in an election,” MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski supplied, “let it be this one.” Nicks agreed.

The twice-inducted Rock & Roll Hall of Famer in an Oct. 24 interview with Rolling Stone expressed her support for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, aligning herself with the sitting vice president’s pro-abortion stance. It’s an issue that’s close to her, she revealed to the outlet, as she had her own abortion in the late 1970s.

Nicks’ was a fluke pregnancy, she said, and carrying to term would have ended her career as she knew it.

“I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years. So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour,” Nicks said.

“I wouldn’t do that to my baby. I wouldn’t say I just need nine months. I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band, period,” she continued. “So my decision was to have an abortion.”

As part of her advocacy for women’s reproductive rights, Nicks in September released her single “The Lighthouse,” which she began writing two years ago — when Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“It seemed like overnight, people were saying ‘what can we, as a collective force, do about this,’” Nicks wrote on Instagram upon the song’s release. “For me, it was to write a song.”

In the track, which she performed on “SNL” earlier this month, Nicks compares herself to a lighthouse, urging women, “Don’t let them take your power.”

“We are that light that goes out, and we bring the ships in so they don’t crash,” she told Rolling Stone earlier this month, expanding on the song’s metaphor to include her fellow women activists. “We save lives every day. The way I feel about this upcoming election is that Kamala Harris is the lighthouse, too.”

“The Lighthouse,” Nicks said Wednesday on MSNBC, is an anthem in the tradition of protest songs written by artists such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell — and, ultimately, a vehicle for political change.

“So I would say to all my musical poets that write songs,” she said, “write some songs about what’s happening, like I did.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.