The 1977 Fleetwood Mac song “Dreams” recently hit #1 in the iTunes music store after a video of a man who filmed himself singing while riding a skateboard and drinking cranberry juice went viral on the social media app TikTok, which introduced many members of Gen-Z to the song for the first time.
There’s also another reason Fleetwood Mac is back in the news: singer Stevie Nicks says the band would not have existed if not for abortion.
“If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs… I would have had to walk away,” Nicks said in a recent interview with The Guardian. “And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
Nicks had an abortion in 1979, when she was dating Eagles singer Don Henley and chose to terminate the pregnancy. That was after the release of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album “Rumours,” though, so it’s not entirely true that the band would not have existed had Nicks become a parent.
“Rumours” won the Grammy for Album of the Year and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with more than 45 million copies sold.
In the same interview, Nicks, 72, expressed regret about later spending eight years addicted to a tranquilizer, time that she says she could have used to have a baby. According to The Guardian, she also said it is annoying that, “so many men of her generation were able to pair up with younger women and start families later in life.”
Nicks is the first female singer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice – once for her contributions to Fleetwood Mac, and once for her solo work.
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