Stevie Nicks said goodbye to Christine McVie onstage because she couldn't in person

Since Christine McVie died, Stevie Nicks has dedicated part of her live shows to her friend. But at her concert in Hershey, Pennsylvania in September, the singer said it would be the last time she’d show the McVie montage and dedicate “Landslide” to her Fleetwood Mac bandmate. “I said, ‘We have to let her go now. We have to say goodbye to Christine, safe journey,'” Nicks told Rolling Stone in a new interview. It was her way of saying goodbye, something Nicks didn’t actually get to do in real life.

“This is the tragedy of it: I had not talked to Chris for a long time,” Nicks explains. After touring together for years at a time with Fleetwood Mac, the pair would part ways, one living in the U.S. and one in England, the time difference complicating communication. It just so happened that the friends hadn’t been able to connect in a while when Nicks got the call that McVie was sick. “I said, ‘OK. We’re going to rent a plane right now, and we’re going to come over there.’ And then we got a call back. Her family said, ‘Don’t come until we see how things go here,'” Nicks recalled. “Her family is super funny, as was she. They said, ‘If you and Mick, that tall man, walk into her hospital room, she’ll go, “Am I dead?”‘ So anyway, a few hours later they called and said that she’d died. So I did not get to say goodbye to her. My plan was to go and sit on her bed and sing ‘Touched By An Angel’ to her, like I did with my dad, for two or three hours or however long it took to either bring her back or send her off. I didn’t get to do that, and I was angry.”

Nicks describes McVie as her “music soulmate” and “best girlfriend,” saying they “kept the band afloat” by “keeping the peace” in a famously contentious (and occasionally drug-fueled) creative environment. “We were the keepers of Fleetwood Mac, and that is why we cannot replace her,” Nicks asserts. “We did replace Lindsey two times, and it was OK. No fighting, super fun. But Christine was different.”

Though the band toured without McVie for a time, it doesn’t seem to have affected their friendship (nor, clearly, did her 2017 collaboration with Nicks’ estranged ex Lindsay Buckingham, whom Nicks spoke to for as “long as [she] could” at McVie’s memorial, which was “about three minutes.”). “I had her from 1975 until she died, and I miss her every day. And I just finally realized being onstage, the night before last, in the rain in front of 30,000 people, that it was time for us to let her go,” Nicks says. “And stop being so sad, because I cried every single night. It’s like, ‘Fly. We’re not holding you down anymore.'”