Stevie Nicks wishes she had been able to perform alongside Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green

Stevie Nicks is no stranger to writing (and performing) sentimental songs with deep connections to real events and people in her life, but the former Fleetwood Mac frontwoman has refused to perform one particular song from her repertoire, saying it’s far too emotional to play live. And it’s easy to see why.

Nicks’ 2003 track recounts the painful memories of a day no American who was alive to witness it will ever forget, including Nicks herself, who was only six miles away when it happened.

The Rock Star Was Minutes Away From 9/11

Stevie Nicks’ “Illume (9-11)” is the third track off Fleetwood Mac’s seventeenth and final studio album, Say You Will. As the name suggests, Nicks wrote the song while trying to process the harrowing emotions of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Although the national tragedy impacted virtually every corner of the United States, it felt especially pressing to Nicks, who was only a few miles away from the Twin Towers when they fell.

“It seems like yesterday,” Nicks recalled in a 2020 memorial post on social media. “Looking down from high up in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at 7:30 on the morning of 9/11 at a sea of yellow cabs, thinking about going out to enjoy the beauty of New York, deciding to go to sleep for a few hours, and then go out. The next time I looked out of that same window, it was totally gray. No sign of life. My assistant didn’t wake me until after the second plane hit, and the world changed.”

“I’ve never been a political person, but suddenly, I felt like I was in the middle of history,” Nicks told USA Today in 2003. “We were at the Waldorf with all these foreign diplomats. It was very scary. I watched people jumping from the Twin Towers on a Mexican TV channel. We put wet towels in the windows to keep out the burning iron smell.”