When I said “Just be Stevie Nicks,” I was thinking of how her work had taught me to see such sensitivity as a source of strength. Many of her songs take place at night, in dreams or visions, “ somewhere out in the back of your mind.” Her narrator frequently asks questions of herself and of some higher power, as if in constant conversation with her own intuition. Heartbreak is survivable, and possibly a key to self-knowledge. In her music, loss is simultaneously earth-shattering and ordinary. For listeners, too, she has always acted as a kind of spiritual guide.

Artists such as Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey have asked her to lend her voice to their songs, and she’s become “fairy godmother” to a wide circle of younger artists. On TikTok, her songs provide a soundtrack to viral videos and fans pay tribute to her witchy aesthetic. In the years since, Nicks’s appeal among younger generations has only grown. Then the show’s production company shut down midseason, and the conversation never aired. We kept up a friendship, and, in 2017, I interviewed her for Rookie’s podcast. Backstage, Nicks gave me a gold moon-shaped necklace-a token she grants to those she’s taken under her wing.

At the concert, in Chicago, I bawled listening to Nicks sing her otherworldly songs, and was stunned when I heard the same voice dedicating her performance of “Landslide” to me. Her cousin had sent her the video of my talk, and she wanted to invite me to a Fleetwood Mac show. I am sure the video would embarrass me now, but I stand by its concluding line: “Just be Stevie Nicks.” A few months later, I heard from Nicks’s management team. At the time, I was editing Rookie, an online magazine for teen girls, and I had recently given a TEDxTeen talk critiquing a trend of superficially “strong” female characters in pop culture. I first met Stevie Nicks in 2013, when I was about to turn seventeen.

Leave Her Hanging by Harry St. John