In 1974, Stevie Nicks wrote her enduring and now iconic song, Landslide. In it she reflects on the challenges of change in one’s life and imaginatively uses the various images and seismic shifts in nature to relate her thoughts and feelings.
I took my love, I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down…
Like many creative artists, Nicks was using her talent to express what was, for her, the inexpressible at that moment. She and her boyfriend, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, had little money and, despite some limited success and encouragement, she wondered whether to continue with her relationship and musical career or, instead, simply leave both and, well, go back to school.
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Mmm, I don’t know….
Little did she know that the following year she would become a part of Fleetwood Mac and the band would explode with a string of hit singles and albums that would earn them worldwide fame, fortune and eventually even a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Not to mention, many of their greatest hits would be written by Nicks herself and that she would go on to have her own hugely successful solo career. And that she and her great love affair with Buckingham would indeed end. And that she and this world famous band would break up, reunite, then break up and reunite, and break up again until even their worldwide fans lost count.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Landslide lately as I’ve spent my days being haunted by the prospect of democracy enduring and the hope (yet fear) of an electoral landslide.
Moreover, I’ve been petrified by the thought of our country’s ability to withstand either and move on even semi-intact.
Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Children get older
And I’m gettin’ older, too
Strangely, it is at this point in the song where there is a long, poignant musical interlude where no words are spoken and we are all, indeed, meant to feel, think and reflect. So it seems appropriate at this moment to consider the crystal clear shift of Americans as we fully take in the results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election vs. where we stood four years ago.
2020 Electoral College (270 needed to win):
- Joseph R. Biden: 306
- Donald J. Trump: 232
2020 Popular Vote (and still counting):
- Joseph R. Biden: 78,686,795
- Donald J. Trump: 73,102,757
2016 Electoral College Results (270 needed to win):
- Donald J. Trump: 306
- Hillary Clinton: 232
2016 Popular Vote Results (final tally):
- Hillary Clinton: 65,853,625
- Donald J. Trump: 62,985,106
Geologically a landslide is the sliding down of a mass of earth or rock from a mountain or cliff. But society, being what it is, long ago appropriated that word for its politics. As a group we freely, and universally, now consider landslide to mean an overwhelming majority of votes for one party in an election.
Certainly we don’t want to get further down into the weeds at what constitutes overwhelming since we now occupy an American space where we find ourselves fist-fighting (and worse) in the public square over whether it should be a moral, and perhaps legal, requirement to wear a mask when coming within six feet of others during our current global, and airborne, viral pandemic.
Note: COVID-19 has so far killed over 1.3 million people worldwide and murders close to1500 Americans daily. Total infections are 53.8 million to date, 10.9 million (almost 20%) of which are in the U.S.
So to be fair, let’s bend over backwards and use the measure of our outgoing POTUS. The guy who tweeted right after his Nov. 2016 win, and restated publicly, privately and throughout the world various iterations of these same thoughts about what constitutes overwhelming and thus, landslides, via his many surrogates over the last four years, in proclamations such as this:
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide . . .”
— Donald Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 27, 2016
“CNN is so embarrassed by their total support of Hillary Clinton and her loss in a landslide, that they don’t know what to do.”
— Donald Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 28, 2016
And —
With 306 established as the legitimate mark of victory and DEFEAT, now might be a good time to remind everyone, especially those who this year LOST, that with the above musical interlude over this is the point in the song where the prior verse again repeats, and by doing so asks us ALL to once again truly rethink, and reflect, on all of our very human natures:
Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
and I’m gettin’ older, too
I’m gettin’ older, too
Now as a writer, I will admit that I am prone to attach superhuman power to the words the best of my fellow writers put together, whether in prose or dialogue, comedy or drama, or anything in between.
But after the last four years I gotta hand it to Steve Nicks for decades later giving us a way to move forward, individually and en masse, when our backs are pressed against the wall.
That’s why this weekend, and hopefully from now on, I take a lot of comfort from her concluding verse. Rather than a shift in weather patterns or a deadly collapsing of the universe as I knew it, it finally offered me massive glimmers of light through the resounding power of reinvention:
So take this love, take it down
If you climb a mountain and turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
And if you see my reflection in the SNO-O-O-O-WWWW covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
Oh, the landslide will bring it down
Listen, none of this is ever without risk. But when you get a chance to level what wasn’t working away and leave behind an avalanche of tweets, it’s hard not to celebrate the sight of a newly imagined playing field and all the potential it offers moving forward.
notes from a chair 