Kristin Recommends: “Storms” by Fleetwood Mac

I am trying to put into words the ways in which this song floors me. It’s the sort of song the undoes all the stitches you’ve painstakingly knotted into yourself. And then Stevie Nicks opens you up. And maybe you don’t want to get out the needle and thread and sew yourself closed.

But you have to.Storms is a song that meditates on the stark loneliness of being a human catastrophe, of surrendering to your own life as a quiet wrecking ball. It is a ballad embracing the warmth of that self love that you have to find to survive this internal ricochet. And there is a certain romance there, unexpectedly so. And every taught string on every guitar tugs at me when I hear Stevie:

Every night that goes between/I feel a little less.

There’s a deep ache inside me — this song finds it and pulls. It’s not the longing of “Silver Springs” or the grief of “Landslide” — “Storms” is something else. It’s not quite melancholy, it’s not quite despair. There’s a settling in here, a nesting, a relinquishing of desire and hope in spite of one’s own truth that is just so incredibly honest. It is a deliverance.

This is an ache that sits with me as I hit play over and over on this song from 1979’s Tusk at two in the morning. “Storms” is the love we let go of because we have to. Not because we want to. We never want to.

Every hour of fear I spend/My body tries to cry.

And I pray into the crescendo chorus — those flawless McVie/Buckingham harmonies. And Stevie’s iconic tambourine anchors me. And she knows me. The earth of her voice gives me peace.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3mp0T5gffo(Song recommendation by E. Kristin Anderson)