A Witch Rumor That Would Not Die

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This episode discusses drug and alcohol dependency and fear of stalking. Take care of yourself while you listen. I'm not a witch, get a life. That's Stevie Nicks in April 1998, chatting online with fans. More than two decades into one of the biggest careers in American music, she was still being asked the same question they'd been asking her for over 20 years. Her answer was short and to the point. This wasn't a woman having fun with the rumor. This was a woman who had run out of patience trying to explain herself. This week, we're investigating how the word witch attached itself to Stevie Nicks and how decades later she decided to just become one on her own terms. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. I'm your host, Christina Rose. So excuse my scratchy voice. It's spooky season, and we're celebrating with a series of episodes about witches. But unlike our usual episodes about women being damaged by their labels, we are starting with an icon episode about a woman who overcame attempts to label her. In 1976, a 28-year-old version of that same woman walked on stage in a black chiffon shawl, closed her eyes, and began to turn in slow circles while she sang about a Welsh figure out of medieval legend. The crowd went quiet in a specific way. Not the quiet of boredom, the quiet of people trying to figure out what they were looking at. By the end of the decade, magazines ran headlines asking, without much irony, whether she could fly. Fans started leaving offerings outside her hotel room doors, crystals, candles, handwritten notes asking her to bless things. A high school would eventually restrict one of her songs from a graduation ceremony because a parent believed it promoted witchcraft. She spent real money, thousands of dollars out of her own pocket, building a wardrobe of black gowns and shawls, then became so frightened by what people were saying about her that she put the whole wardrobe away and wore apricot instead for the better part of a year. And as a huge fan of black clothing myself, I cannot even imagine having to wear apricot for almost a year. The yuck. Because she's just extraordinarily good at this. Somehow wasn't satisfying enough.

Why The Word Witch Stings

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Before we get into Stevie Nicks, I want to spend a little time talking about the label itself. Because calling someone a witch comes preloaded with centuries of baggage, most of it about controlling women who stood out from their communities in ways that made other people uncomfortable. Historically, the label was rarely a real accusation of supernatural belief. It was a way to put a woman back in her place. And that's really all the background we need for now. I'm gonna be doing a full episode on the history of the witch label soon, after a three-part series on the women of Salem. So we're not gonna go too deep here. For today, just remember that when a woman gets called a witch, it's almost never actually about magic. It's about what she's doing that makes people uncomfortable enough to need a warning label. Follow if you don't want to miss out on the full history of the label or on the Salem series. But let's start with who she was before any of this happened.

The Work Behind Stevie Nicks

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Stephanie Lynn Nicks was born on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona, to Barbara Nicks, a homemaker, and Jess Nicks, a corporate executive whose career moved the family across the Southwest and into California. Her grandfather, Aaron Jess Nicks, AJ to everyone who knew him, and fittingly a man who shared a birthday with her almost to the day, was an aspiring country musician who handcrafted her a guitar and had her singing duets with him at local venues by the time she was five years old. Unlike many other artists, music wasn't just an escape route. It was part of the family from the very beginning. By the mid-1960s, the family had settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. And by high school, Nyx was in Palo Alto, where she met a guitarist named Lindsay Buckingham at a party. And the two of them began singing California Dreaming Together, according to most accounts. The first time they ever performed together was also the first time they met. And that meeting was a pivotal moment in her career. She and Buckingham started writing and performing together. They also joined a band called Fritz and opened for acts like Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. When Fritz dissolved in 1971, they decided to be a duo. They released one commercially unsuccessful album, Buckingham Nyx, in 1973. While they waited for fame to come, Nicks worked several jobs, including as a waitress, a dental assistant, and a cleaning lady. So Buckingham could keep working on the music without also having to hold down a job. So long before anyone was calling her otherworldly, she was the one working to make rent. This was not a woman who floated into fame on the strength of some otherworldly aura. She weighted tables, she scrubbed other people's houses, she did it so a partnership she believed in could survive long enough to get a real shot. She has since described what that grinding, unglamorous period actually gave her. Quote, I could get out of the house and go into the real world instead of being in a cave with all the guys. A realistic description of a working musician building an independent life, not a woman casting spells for fame. The Buckingham Knicks album cover itself is worth noting because it's an early, uncomfortable preview of who gets to decide what Stevie Nick's image means. The record label wanted a striking cover, and what they landed on was a nude portrait of the two of them. Nyx has said she was genuinely terrified by the idea. Quote, I could not have been more terrified if you'd asked me to jump off a speeding train, end quote. And that when she hesitated, Buckingham brushed her off, saying, Oh, come on, this is art. Don't be a child. She went through with it anyway. Quote, I did it because I felt like a rat in a trap, she'd said. Her father, seeing the finished cover, told her something she'd carry for the rest of her career. You always have a choice. She was 25, and the first real fight over her own image had nothing to do with witchcraft at all. It was just the industry and the man she loved telling her that her discomfort with her own body on a record sleeve wasn't a good enough reason to say no. And I just want to interject with a personal note for anyone who has ever been told you always have a choice. Well, it sounds like good advice. It's just not true. As we've seen throughout this podcast, sometimes the choice is between two labels. And in this case, it's between being called a child by your boyfriend or being a disappointment to your father. So yeah, you do have a choice, but it's definitely not a fair one. Their big break came at the end of 1974 when producer Keith Olsen played an instrumental track off Buckingham Nicks called Frozen Love for Fleetwood Mac drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood, who was touring studios in Los Angeles looking for a new guitarist. Fleetwood liked what he heard and reached out to Buckingham. Buckingham said yes on one condition. Nyx came with him as a package. Fleetwood Mac's self-titled 1975 album, the first with Nyx and Buckingham, sold half a million copies within months and reached number one on the Billboard charts. Two of the songs, Rihannin and Landslide, ended up defining the record's identity, and both of them were written by Nyx. She actually wrote Landslide a year earlier in Aspen, Colorado, during a period of uncertainty about her relationship with Buckingham, both musically and romantically. It's a song about being afraid to keep climbing a mountain you're not sure is worth climbing. So she wasn't just any singer joining a band. She came with songs already written that people, including myself, would still be covering 50 years later. She had already proven herself as a songwriter, a good one, a commercially successful one on a chart-topping album before a single person called her a witch. That label was layered onto a career that was already working entirely on its own merits. And then came rumors, recorded through 1976, while nearly every romantic relationship inside the band was collapsing at once. The McVeigh's divorcing mid-album, Mick Fleetwood separating from his wife, and Nixon Buckingham ending their decade-long relationship while still sitting across from each other in the studio every day. Rumors would go on to spend 31 weeks at number one, sell more than 20 million copies worldwide, and win Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammys. Nick's song Dreams, written largely about the end of things with Buckingham, became the band's only number one single. By any conventional measure, she was now one of the most successful songwriters alive, in the middle of one of the best-selling albums in American recording history. Nyx had also written a song called Silver Springs for the album, a song that her own producer would later call a masterpiece. But it got cut, not for lack of quality, but it ran too long and slow to fit the sequence. It ended up being buried on the B side of Go Your Own Way, which happened to be the song Buckingham had written about Nyx. Nyx objected strenuously and repeatedly, and it resurfaced hard enough that a dispute over the song was part of what drove her to briefly leave the band in 1991. It took until 1997 when Fleetwood Mac reunited for the live album The Dance for Silver Springs to finally get its due. Performed live and released 21 years after she wrote it. My beautiful song just disappeared, she said of the original cut. For it to come back around like this has really been special to me. Those 1976 rumor sessions took a physical toll, too, on top of everything else. Nyx developed a vocal hemorrhage severe enough to require medical treatment during the sessions, singing through pain on songs that still sound effortless. That combination, real heartbreak, real physical strain, genuinely difficult studio conditions, all in service of songs that would define an era, is worth noting. Because it's the exact opposite of what mystical and otherworldly suggests. There was nothing effortless or supernatural about how rumors got made. It got made the hard way by professionals grinding through a terrible year at work, the same way any other album gets made. So to recap, a woman who had just co-written one of the best-selling albums of all time through genuine physical and emotional difficulty was about to spend the next several years being asked in interview after interview, not about her craft, not about how she built a bridge or landed a chorus, not about the vocal chords she'd strained getting dreams onto tape, but about whether she could cast spells. Her songwriting credibility was further validated in 1981 when Nick's solo album, Bella Donna, made independently of Fleetwood Mac, debuted at number 12 on the Billboard 200, climbing to number one within weeks and staying on the charts for nearly three years straight. It produced four hit singles, including Stop Dragging My Heart Around with musician Tom Petty and Leather and Lace with musician Don Henley. And it eventually sold four million copies in the United States alone. Whatever anyone wanted to say about her image, the commercial verdict on her actual songwriting standing entirely on its own outside the band that made her famous was about as unambiguous as it gets. Before she was labeled a witch, Nyx was super conscientious about her image already, especially being in the music industry, which was run entirely by men in the 1970s. Here's a quote about her and her bandmate Christine McVie. When we walk into the room, we have to float in like goddesses, because that is how we want to be treated. She's explained the reasoning behind that strategy elsewhere, and it's tactical. You can't just like be a wimp and then a year and a half or two years later decide to not be a wimp anymore, she said. Because people will always treat you like a wimp once they have decided that's what you are. So her image was her armor. And as we're about to get into it, it was also about to become a trap because she was right. Once an image sets in the public imagination, whether a person chose it or not, it tends to stick. The goddess label was armor she chose, but the witch label coming up next was the one that stuck. A trap she did not choose. And we'll get into that after this break.

How Rhiannon Sparked The Rumor

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So, where did the witch accusation actually come from? The direct source is a song. In 1973, Nyx wrote Rihannin after reading a novel by Mary Leader titled Triad, which featured a character drawn from Welsh mythology. A woman associated across different tellings of the legend with birds, horses, and a kind of sovereign otherworldly authority. Nix liked the name and the imagery enough to build an entire song around it. And when Fleetwood Mac performed it live, she introduced it from the stage in plain, unambiguous language. This is a song about a witch. And that's how it started with her introducing a song to the audience. But intention and reception are two different things. And the reception got away from her almost immediately, caused by several factors coming together at once. First, there was the performance itself. On February 27, 1976, Fleetwood Mac played Rihannin live on NBC's The Midnight Special in front of the biggest television audience the song would ever get. And Nyx moved through it with a kind of a trance-like performance, spinning, extending her arms, closing her eyes during the instrumental breaks. Critics and audiences began describing it as if she were channeling something. She's not a person who half cooks anything, Mick Fleetwood has said. So her Rianin in those days was like an exorcism. That was Fleetwood's words. That's a bandmate paying her a real compliment about committing to a performance. And it's also, word for word, exactly the kind of language that helped convince the public she wasn't performing at all. Second, there was the wardrobe, the flowing black chiffon, the shawls, the performance boots, an aesthetic she had built herself on purpose as a working performer's uniform. Something dramatic enough to read from the back of the arena, something she could actually move in without tripping over a hem. She's also said that she wore black because it made her look thin. And I can relate to that. Third, there was timing. The mid to late 1970s in America was a genuine high point for what's often called the New Age movement. A surge of mainstream interest in astrology, tarot, crystal healing, and spiritual practices outside of traditional religion. This came after a decade of hippie era spiritual experimentation had already made cult imagery cool instead of scary. The cultural appetite for a mystical female pop icon was already sitting there, waiting for a face. Nyx simply became the person it got projected onto, without caring if she'd wanted it or not. And it was the exact moment she should have been recognized, first and foremost, as a songwriter who had helped write one of the decade's biggest albums. Then came the Satanic Panic, a wave of Christian evangelical alarm, beginning in the late 70s and spreading hard into the 80s, targeting rock music. Preachers warned congregations about hidden messages supposedly buried backward in records, and talk shows ran segments on hidden covens. In this environment, a woman who sang about witches and dressed like one wasn't just an interesting cultural curiosity anymore. She became a target. There's a fourth factor, too. Rock criticism in the 1970s was overwhelmingly written by men, for publications run by men, reviewing an industry controlled by men. When a male critic sat down to describe Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant's stage presence, he reached for words like commanding or charismatic. But when another encountered a woman doing something structurally similar, building a persona, commanding a stage, writing her own mythology into her lyrics, most of them reached for witchy, spooky, and strange instead. One description treats the performer as an artist making choices. The other treats her as an oddity to be questioned. In the same decade, musician David Bowie built an entire persona around playing a literal alien, and no one demanded to know where his spacecraft was registered. Shock rock performer Alice Cooper's stage show ended with a fake execution nearly every night, and nobody wrote think pieces asking whether he'd actually died. Male rock stars got to build elaborate theatrical larger-than-life personas and have those personas understood correctly as performance, a costume, a bit, a persona. But when Stevie Nicks, a woman, did the exact same thing, built a persona and performed it convincingly, a large part of the public and press treated that performance as a reveal of her real identity. In 1972, the Eagles, a band of men, released a song called Witchy Woman, describing a woman entirely from a man's point of view. The man's idea of what Mysterious woman must be like. She never gets to speak for herself anywhere in the lyrics. Nyx, a woman, on the other hand, wrote a song about a fictional witch from a book written from a female point of view. Guess which one didn't bring criticism? The one about the witch from the woman's point of view. That's the one that brought criticism. And remember what we said in the beginning about when women get called a witch, when she steps outside societal expectations? Well, as we've already learned from Monroe's episode, those expectations tend to be set by men. The press obviously did not see that distinction. By the early 1980s, journalists weren't asking Nyx about her songwriting process at all. They were asking her, apparently in earnest, whether she practiced witchcraft, whether her all-black wardrobe was a costume or a coven uniform, and whether the rumor that she'd once been formally initiated into an actual coven in San Francisco, a claim with no real basis that nonetheless followed her around for years, was true. Entire magazine profiles would spend paragraphs on her supposed rituals, spellcasting, and powers, treating the question of whether she was really a witch as a legitimate angle for a music interview. This was never done to any of her male peers about their own performance. All because a talented woman dressed unconventionally with an intense stage presence was easier for much of the public to dismiss as a witch than to describe as an extremely successful rock songwriter with a strong self-authored visual sense. The label was never really about a genuine belief in magic. It was a cage the press put her in because she made a lot of people, particularly male journalists, working in the 1970s and the 80s uneasy. This is a pattern you'll notice runs through almost every episode of this show. And we've seen it with all three women we've already covered: Marilyn Monroe, Anna Mae Wong, and Hattie McDaniel. The label almost never describes what's actually happening to the woman it's attached to. It describes what's easiest for the people doing the labeling. And here's the proof of that in her own words: a moment where the vocabulary wasn't mystical at all and the treatment was exactly the same. This is Nyx reflecting on trying to be taken seriously by the male songwriter she personally admired most. And remember, this was a woman who had co-written some of the best-selling songs of the decade. I could only look in awe at all these men because I'm a songwriter. And what I really wanted to do was I wanted to be accepted by these people as a lady songwriter and not as just a girl. And I never really got accepted as anything else but a girl by any of them. And does her being called a girl sound familiar? Because that's what Buckingham called her when she was uneasy about posing naked for their album cover. Remember? So the witch label and the girl label, they're doing the same underlying work from two different directions. You don't ask a witch how she structured her bridge. Girl trivializes the same talent into something that doesn't need to be examined at all. So that should sound familiar too. If you listen to our episode one, Are Women Human, we talked about hostile sexism and benevolent sexism and how they both do the same thing. The witch is the hostile sexism. Girl is the benevolent sexism. But in both cases, you're expected to do what society says you should do. And if you want to learn more about that theory, um, go listen to episode one are women human. So either way, the actual work, the chord choices, the lyric construction, the arrangement decisions that made Rihanna and Dreams and Landslide function as songs, not just as vibes, gets discussed less than her hemline, her hand gestures, or her love life.

When A Label Becomes A Threat

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And the label caused real damage. Nix has talked across decades of interviews in real and specific detail about what the witch narrative did to her. It wasn't nothing. Like the fear she felt in the early years of the rumor. Quote: In the beginning of my career, the whole idea that some wacky, creepy people were writing, you're a witch, you're a witch, was so arresting. Arresting is a carefully chosen word from a professional lyricist. It means captivating, but it's also the word for being taken into custody. And both meanings fit in this situation. The attention was captivating enough to make her a star, and it was also a kind of custody, holding her in place as a character and never letting her be anything else. She has described the sustained attention as genuinely frightening. Strangers who believed the persona were literally showing up around her hotels and tour stops, leaving crystals, candles, and handwritten notes at her door, waiting for her outside venues in a way that crossed quickly from admiration into obsession. She's described real anxiety about her physical safety during this period, including worry about being targeted or followed by people who could not separate the character on a stage from the woman living an actual ordinary life. And yes, this is the experience of a lot of celebrities. But this isn't a general discomfort with fame. It's a specific consequence of being labeled a witch. Because if enough of the public genuinely believes you have supernatural powers, some of them are going to believe you can use that power on them, for them, or against them. The label wasn't just a word. It changed how strangers behaved around her for years. This fear also led to self-censorship. For roughly a year, by her own account, Nick stopped wearing black clothing entirely and switched to lighter colors, apricot specifically, trying to physically distance herself from the witch image. And remember, she designed this wardrobe herself, spent real money assembling it, and found it genuinely useful as a performer who needed to move dramatically under stage lighting in front of thousands of people a night. And she gave it up. Not because it had stopped working for her as a performer, but because she had become frightened of what the public was projecting onto it. The damage was not only on what people noticed about her, but also in what people ignored. While the press spent two decades asking whether Nyx practiced witchcraft, a far more serious story was unfolding that almost nobody thought to ask about. Nyx developed a serious cocaine addiction across the late 1970s and into the 80s, severe enough that it eventually wore a hole through the cartilage of her nose. And in 1986, she entered the Betty Ford clinic for a 28-day program. A psychiatrist then prescribed her clonopin to help manage the transition of cocaine, and she ended up becoming dependent on that instead. According to her own descriptions, she spent the late 80s and early 90s functioning through a kind of fog, still touring, still recording, while heavily medicated, gaining weight, and losing time, she has no clear memory of. She didn't fully detox until 1993. The seven years on Clonopin weren't just difficult. They were, in her words, a kind of erasure. It turned me into a zombie, she said, describing herself during that period as having become the whatever person. I didn't care about anything anymore. She's talked about a specific jarring moment of looking in a mirror during the weight gain that came with heavy sedation and not recognizing her own reflection. And she's been unusually direct about what the drug did to her writing. Writers do not thrive on drugs like clonapin, she said. It takes your soul, it takes your creativity. When she finally detoxed in 1993, she described the withdrawal itself as worse than coming off cocaine had ever been. But none of it, the addiction, the eight lost years, the withdrawal, got anywhere near the scrutiny her witch reputation did. Interviewers asked about Covens and spellcasting. Almost nobody asked how she was actually doing. For nearly two decades, the public conversation about Stevie Nicks ran almost entirely on the topics of magic and mystery, while the actual medically documented crisis of her life, a drug dependency serious enough to erase her sense of herself in that mirror, stayed almost entirely off the record. And there's even a song in her own catalog that makes this collision almost eerily explicit. In 1976, at the height of the rumor sessions, she wrote a song called Gold Dust Woman, built around dragon imagery and black widow imagery, a song her producer would later call kind of creepy, and Buckingham would flatly describe as an evil song, very dark. For years, fans and critics alike filed the song into the same mystical, occult adjacent reading as everything else she wrote: dragons, spells, dark magic. It took Nick's explaining it directly years later in a 1997 interview for the actual subject to register. Gold Dust was cocaine. The song was about watching people around her chase a drug that was going to hollow them out, written a full decade before she'd check into rehab herself. She had already written a song that was essentially an early warning about addiction, and everyone heard Witchcraft instead, because witchcraft was the frame they'd already decided to hear her through. That label actively worked against her safety, obscuring a real and serious struggle behind an aesthetic nobody had bothered to look past. And the rumor had a genuinely long shelf life. In 1998, more than two decades after Rihanna first hit the radio, a controversy over a high school bachelorette ceremony erupted over whether students could perform one of her songs after a parent objected on the grounds that it promoted witchcraft. Nick's response by that point had curdled from fear into something close to sheer exhaustion. Quote, I can't believe people are still telling me I'm a witch because I wear black. 22 years is a long time to still be explaining your own wardrobe to strangers who've never met you. Think about how much energy this cost her. Not creative energy, not the energy that goes into actually writing a song, but the ongoing maintenance work of managing a rumor that had nothing to do with what she made for a living, decade after decade, while also quietly surviving a genuine medical crisis, the rumor kept hidden from view. Again, going back to episode one, this is exactly what we described. It takes four seconds to label a woman, but it can take an entire lifetime for her to defend herself. It's no wonder she found it easier to just embrace the label instead. And we'll talk about that next.

Reclaiming The Witch On Purpose

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So, how do you get from I was frightened enough to put my black dresses away for a year to a woman who decades later plays herself as a witch on TV and called it fun. The turn didn't happen all at once, and the world didn't really change its mind about her. It was Nyx changing her relationship to her own image, deciding at some point that letting a rumor dictate how she looked was worse than simply owning the rumor outright. Here's how she described the moment that shifted her perspective. Okay, just bring it, freaks. I'm not going to wear apricot. You think whatever you want because I'm going to wear my beautiful long black dress. That's not someone who stopped caring about what people thought of her. That's someone who ran the math and concluded the label would stick no matter what she did with her closet, so she might as well spend the rest of her career wearing the clothes she actually liked while it happened anyway. It turns out that reclaiming a label often looks less like a triumphant press release and more like a tired woman quietly deciding that fear isn't worth an apricot dress she never wanted in the first place. Or a tired woman deciding to just start a podcast called Witches, Bitches, and Slut. That counts too. In 1998, the same year she was still fielding questions about a high school bachelorette ceremony. Nyx contributed two original songs to the soundtrack of Practical Magic, one of the most iconic movies about witchcraft ever. The film was about a family of witches played by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, built entirely around sympathetic modern witchcraft as a metaphor for female inheritance and resilience. So more than two decades after Rihanna first got her labeled, she wasn't running from the witch imagery anymore. She was choosing on her own schedule which witch stories to lend her voice to. Essentially playing a heightened fictionalized version of her own myth on her own terms for the first time. She was nervous going in and jokingly expressed her concern about being remembered as Stevie Nick's rock and roll star, par excellence, terrible actress. But she said yes anyway. Before her white witch character even shows up, the show built a character around her real persona. Misty Day, a lonely, resurrected swamp witch, spends her days listening to Stevie Nick's records on repeat and treats Rihannin as proof that her idol has real power. When Nyx appears on screen, the show has her perform for Misty Directly, a small, deliberate gift to a fictional fan built entirely out of the same mythology that once frightened the real woman. It's a strange, almost tender piece of full circle writing. The culture had spent decades turning Nyx into exactly this kind of devotional object. And now she got to walk into that fantasy and hand it back as something warm instead of something invasive. She came back for a second run on American horror story Apocalypse in 2018. And by her own account, watching the finished episodes made her genuinely, unexpectedly enthusiastic about a persona she had once run from in real fear. She described herself around this period as finally grown up and fearless about the whole thing. Fearless, standing in direct, deliberate opposition to the fear that had once driven her out of her own wardrobe. Then came 2019, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her

The Legacy She Made Usable

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a second time, this time as a solo artist, after she had already been inducted once with Fleetwood Mack in 1998, making her the first woman in Hall's history to be inducted twice. Musician Harry Stiles gave the introduction speech, calling her, by most accounts, one of the most influential women in the history of rock music. In her own remarks that same evening, Nyx didn't reach for mystical language. She reached for the plainest possible description of the labor it took to get there. Quote, three waitress jobs, two cleaning lady jobs. It was cool. End quote. So now we have a woman putting on a witch's costume for television, at ease enjoying herself. And that same woman at the literal pinnacle of the industry's recognition, choosing to remind an entire room that she used to wait tables. And that's the point of this episode. It was a label given to a working songwriter who got told for decades that the mythology about her work was more real than the craft underneath it. After losing time and peace of mind trying to prove otherwise, she eventually decided that the label was something she could control, hers to put on and take off at will, instead of a cage other people had built around her in an attempt to contain her because they were uncomfortable with her performance. Being called a witch by people you don't know is a cage. Calling yourself a witch on your own terms means you're the one deciding what it means. Stevie Nick spent roughly 20 years moving from the first to the second. And it worked. Stevie Nicks didn't just make peace with the witch label for herself. She became the reference point for a whole younger generation of women who want to describe their own relationship to mystique, control, and image. In 2024, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released a song called Clara Beau, in which she sings about Beau, Nick's, and Swift's shared experience of having their image overshadow their work. Nick's even wrote an original poem that was printed on the vinyl edition of the album. Their relationship goes back further than just one song. The two first performed together at the 2010 Grammys, blending Rihannin with Swift's You Belong With Me. The elder stateswoman of Mystical Rock handing something off on a public stage to the next generation's biggest new songwriter. In 2022, Nyx publicly credited a Swift song, You're on Your Own, Kid, with helping her get through the grief of losing longtime bandmate Christine McVeigh, which tells you the exchange was never run in only one direction. The witch label, the thing that once genuinely frightened her, eventually became a kind of inheritance, a visual and thematic language other women in music could borrow, deliberately, the same way Nyx had once borrowed a name out of a novel and made it her own. The difference is that the artists borrowing it from her now get to do so without having to survive what she survived to make it safe to borrow. Nobody's asking Taylor Swift whether she can fly. And that's not an accident. That's the measurable outcome of one woman spending two decades absorbing a label until it stopped being a threat and became a resource. It shows up in smaller ways too, all over the current cultural landscape. The general mainstreaming of Witchy as an aesthetic and even a marketing category, tarot cards and moon phase apps and crystal shops that would have registered as fringe in 1978 and now sit comfortably in an ordinary shopping mall. None of that happened because of Stevie Nicks alone, obviously. It's a much bigger cultural current than any one artist. But she was one of the first extremely famous women to live inside that imagery in public, get punished for it in real documented ways, and come out the other side still standing, still working, still selling out arenas in her 70s. That survival is evidence. It's a lot easier for a stereotype to shrink into something fun and marketable once someone has already proven that living inside it for real doesn't cost you your career, even though it can cost you plenty else along the way. As we've seen, which was never really an accusation of sorcery. It was a way to avoid saying, extraordinarily successful female songwriter with a strong self-authored visual identity that I, the journalist, find a little unsettling and would rather not examine directly. It's also a softer sounding word than threatening. But for a couple decades, it focused the conversation on her image instead of her talent, while the human was quietly writing some of the most enduring songs of her era and later quietly surviving addiction, the mystique kept hidden from public view. What makes her story different from so many of the others we cover is that she got to write the last chapter herself. Not every woman on the show gets that chance. Some of the women we've covered didn't live long enough to see their labels loosen. Some are still fighting to be seen as anything other than the terms that got attached to them decades ago with no real resolution in sight. Stevie Nicks is one of the rarer stories in this catalog. A woman who lived long enough, kept working long enough, and stayed famous long enough to take the label back into her own hands on her own timeline. To play the white witch on her own terms on a television show she chose to join. To stand in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, the only woman in its history to do so. To watch Silver Springs, the song that got buried on a B side, finally get its due. To hand a piece of her own mythology to the next generation of women songwriters who never had to fight the version of the battle she fought, and to tell the story of the waitress jobs right alongside the story of Rihannin in the very same breath, making it unmistakably clear those were always the same story. A working songwriter's story. It's tempting when you tell a story like this to land on something tidy. She suffered and then she triumphed. The end. The truth is a lot less neat. The fear was real, the self-censorship was real. The addiction that the mystique helped obscure was real. And it cost her the better part of a decade that by her own description was lost to her own memory. None of that gets erased by the fact that she eventually made peace with the label. For many women, it's not a clean line from damage to triumph, but damage and triumph sitting right next to each other for decades until one of them finally gets to speak louder. And just like all of the women we cover, the label was never about who Stevie Nicks actually was. It was just the easiest way to deal with a woman society didn't know how to categorize. Brilliant, commercially dominant, visually uncompromising, and entirely unwilling to shrink herself down, did not fit the image of the ideal woman or any other label they have seen in their lifetime. Which became shorthand for we don't have better language for this, and it took Nyx the better part of her adult life to write the better language herself. I think her legacy was best summed up by Harry Styles at her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. Quote, by being so unapologetically herself, she gives others permission to do the same. End quote.

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You can also support the show directly on Buy MeACoffee. The link is in the show notes. If this episode made you think about a label you spent years trying to outrun, or one you eventually just decided to put back on on your own terms, I want to hear about it. Send me your story in a DM on Instagram at the the.wbs.pod. That's the the.pod. Or email me at the WBSpod at gmail.com. If you want to dig deeper into Stevie Nick's story, the full research list is in the show notes. Join me next week for Chichiba, the first of three Salem Witch Trial episodes in our spooky season lineup. This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. I'm Christina Rose. Thanks for listening.