Stevie Nicks is thanking Taylor Swift for helping her mourn her friend.
While the Fleetwood Mac singer has been paying tribute at her shows to late friend and bandmate Christine McVie, who died in November, she made special mention of Swift and one particular piece on the singer’s Midnights album during Monday’s concert in Atlanta.
“Thank you to Taylor Swift for doing a favour for me, and that is writing a song called ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid,’” Nicks said. “That is the sadness of how I feel. As long as Chris was, even on the other side of the world, we didn’t have to talk on the phone.”
“We really weren’t phone buddies,” she continued. “Then we’d go back to Fleetwood Mac, and we’d walk in and it would just be like, ‘Little sister, how are you?’ It was like never a minute had passed, never an argument in our entire 47 years — never.”
“So, when it was the two of us, the two of us were on our own, kids, we always were,” Nicks continued. “And now, I’m having to learn to be on my own, kid, by myself. So, you helped me to do that. Thank you.”
Nicks and McVie had been close friends for nearly half a century when McVie died at 79 years old from a stroke and metastasized cancer. The band posted a heartfelt tribute within hours that described McVie as “one-of-a-kind, special and talented beyond measure.”
Nicks has since busied herself with a string of tour dates across the US. The grieving Landslide singer was so touched by Swift’s latest work and the lyrics to You’re on Your Own, Kid, however, that she was able to more properly grieve her friend through music.
“’Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned, everything you lose is a step you take,” Swift sings in the piece. “So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it. You’ve got no reason to be afraid, you’re on your own, kid.”
While Nicks tweeted the lyrics to a Haim song at the time of McVie’s death, she and Swift have long been amicable — and performed Rhiannon together at the 2010 Grammys. Ever the peace broker, Nicks even mediated Swift’s infamous beef with Katy Perry.
In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Nicks recalled a conversation from about 10 years ago in which Perry told her, “‘Well, there’s, like, the Taylor Swift army and there’s, like, the Katy army, and there’s like—.’”
Nicks continued: “And I was, like, ‘That’s just bullshit. You have to just walk away from that. Don’t carry that around in your mind.’”
The power of Nicks is such that, a few years later, Perry sent Swift a literal olive branch.
“Thank you Katy,” Swift reportedly posted on her Instagram story at the time. “So I just got to my dressing room and found this actual olive branch. This means too much to me.”
On Monday, Nicks sent the same words out to Swift: “Thank you.”