(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 5 February 2026 5:00, UK
There’s a good chance that Stevie Nicks is going to continue making music until the sun burns out of the sky.
Whereas most people see their time in show business as a job, Nicks saw her role in Fleetwood Mac as a higher calling when she started making her classics like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Landslide’. She wanted the chance to make music that would be around long after she was gone, and although she had a lot of heroes to give her the confidence she needed, she was gutted to watch some of them leave so soon.
Then again, rock and roll hasn’t run short of a few casualties, especially in Nicks’s generation. Some of the biggest stars like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were shining way too bright for them to sustain for too long, and even to this day, ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ has had to deal with saying goodbye to everyone from Christine McVie to her best friend Robin while she was making some of her iconic tunes.
But there’s a difference between someone passing away and someone walking away from the business after a while. For as fun as the job might look on paper, there are a lot more middlemen in there to make everyone’s life a living hell when they hit the road or walk into the studio, and sometimes the pressure isn’t really worth it if you’re trying to have fun making music with your friends.
After all, that’s half the reason why Christine left Fleetwood Mac for a while. She couldn’t deal with the rigorous touring schedules and flying everywhere, but there are just as many artists who have chosen to walk away because they didn’t have anything left to say, either. Billy Joel bowed out years ago, and the Eagles have sworn to never make another album without Glenn Frey, but having Cat Stevens retire from music hit a particularly sour note with Nicks.
It’s only natural for so many people to pump the brakes as they get older, but when listening to the folk legend perform at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nicks was stunned that he still had all of his chops. Most singers can come out of retirement and look like a shadow of their former self, but even in a ceremony that honoured bands like Kiss, Yusuf’s renditions of tunes like ‘Peace Train’ reminded everyone why those songs were so iconic in the first place.
Anyone would have been happy just to see him again, but Nicks felt that the icon needed to come out of retirement now more than ever, saying, “I think that he should come back, because I think that somebody like Cat Stevens or Yusuf – whichever name he chooses to go by – I think his message of peace and love is great. And I think that it showed very much in that huge audience tonight that his music can promote peace and love, and he should do it because he can.”
And it’s not like Nicks doesn’t have a small point about his message needing to be heard. There are plenty of artists that have used their songs to say their innermost thoughts every time they get a microphone in their hands, but tunes like ‘Father and Son’ and ‘Morning Has Broken’ are there to remind everyone that only love can conquer hate and to appreciate the journey that we go through every moment of our lives.
Those kinds of sentiments might not be gone forever, but maybe we need songs like this to nudge us towards a more peaceful world. It’s up to Yusuf whether he actually wants to come back to the pop charts, but there’s no doubt that plenty of fans would be more than happy to have him back, even if it’s just for a tour.
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