(Credit: NBC / YouTube)
Sat 2 August 2025 19:15, UK
Stevie Nicks is celebrated for her ability to pour love, loss and heartache into poetic storytelling. But it’s also something she appreciates in another song, one that always makes her cry…
There’s something inherently poignant about that old movie trope where the hero or heroin sees their long-lost love from across a bar or cafe some years later, years after they last spoke, and there’s a quiet stillness in the air, like all memories come back with a new sting of pain after the realisation that things aren’t what they once were. Or the fantasy that, with a single greeting, maybe they could be again.
It’s like the end of The Dark Night Rises, when Alfred berates Bruce Wayne for “waiting” his life away, only for his insecurities to be reflected on him and his admittance that “every year, I took a holiday to Florence” where he’d wait in a cafe, wait for a fantasy to come to life where he’d look across the tables and he’d see Wayne there with a wife.
“You wouldn’t say anything to me, nor me to you,” he said. “But we’d both know that you’d made it.”
Obviously, the romance of the unfulfilled fantasy lies in the fact that that’s all it is – unfulfilled. But that’s also the same feeling lurking in the crevices of many of Nicks’ best storytelling masterpieces, namely the way she can ghost her heart over the more unspoken sentiments about how loss isn’t usually as cut and dry as the literal practice of losing someone, but of losing situations, thoughts, feelings and memories before they’ve even happened.
(Credits: Jimmy Kimmel Live)
For many reasons, this is why one of her favourite songs – the one that always makes her cry – also says a lot about her. Dan Fogelberg’s ‘Same Old Lang Syne’, as the name likely suggests, was written about those old connections and relationships you come across much later, the ones that make you ruminate on the past and think about how things once were, whether they’d still be the same now, after everything that’s happened in between.
An autobiographical tune about Fogelberg running into an old friend at a grocery store on Christmas Eve, of all times, the song hit Nicks where it counts. “To this day, when that song comes on, it makes me cry,” she explained. “Because I think that we have all run into somebody that we absolutely loved a long time ago. And you meet them and you’re older, but that’s when you go ‘Real love never dies’.”
She added, “Because it doesn’t matter that they’re older and it doesn’t matter that they don’t look exactly like they did when they were nineteen. They still have that light that attracted you in the beginning, and you feel that.”
Of course, it doesn’t take long to realise who Nicks is probably thinking of when listening to the song or imagining opportunities lost, but this also says a lot about what drives her as an artist, particularly when it comes to matters of the heart, and how she’s always pulling on an open thread to keep those things on the surface as gems of poetic expression, the things that make her who she is, and the flames of inspiration that will forever make her one of the most heartfelt writers in music history.
It’s the same ache that lingers beneath the surface of some of her more cutting compositions, like ‘Dreams’, even as she berates her love for not appreciating her when she was the only one worth appreciating. Or ‘Silver Springs’, when she conjures up some kind of spell to haunt her ex-lover for all time, when beneath the surface, there’s a more vulnerable tragedy there – the kind that ghosts by in cafes or bars, years later, when you’re left with nothing but the pretence of hypotheticals.
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