Stevie Nicks has built an entire career on writing songs about significant relationships in her life, and her 2013 track “You Can’t Fix This” is certainly no exception. But unlike other songs about Nicks’ romantic relationships, like “Dreams,” or platonic friendships, like “Sara,” the former Fleetwood Mac frontwoman wrote her 2013 track about a familial connection.
Despite never having children of her own, several of Nicks’ friends and colleagues gave her the title of godmother to their kids. This included Glen Parrish, Nicks’ former manager, who asked the “Rhiannon” singer to be the godmother to his son and namesake, Glen Parrish Jr.
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Not quite two decades later, Nicks wrote and recorded her ode to Glen Jr.
The Devastating Personal Loss Behind Stevie Nicks’ “You Can’t Fix This”
In the fall of 2011, Glen Parrish Jr. was attending a party at the Theta Chi fraternity house on UCLA’s campus. Friends of the 18-year-old, who was neither a UCLA student nor a member of the fraternity, found Parrish unresponsive in a bedroom. Emergency responders pronounced the teenager dead at the scene, and following reports stated that alcohol, prescription drugs, or a combination of the two contributed to his death.
Stevie Nicks, Parrish’s godmother, spoke of the tragedy at a January 2013 performance at the Hollywood Palladium. “[He] overdosed at a fraternity party a year and two months ago,” Nicks said as she nervously fiddled with her gloves. “It was a very difficult situation. He had just turned eighteen. We’re all still trying to deal with it now.”
She said she brought her poem to Dave Grohl, who had asked Nicks to contribute a song to ‘Sound City: Real to Reel,’ the soundtrack to Grohl’s directorial debut documentary about Los Angeles’ historic Sound City Studios. “I said, ‘Do you want to go there with me, Dave?’” Nicks recalled to the crowd. “Because it’s heavy. And Dave said, ‘I’m going there with you, babe.’ So, in our day, we made a pact not to dance with the devil. We did a lot of other things, but we never danced with the devil. Unfortunately, this little boy danced with the devil, and this is his story.”
The Multiple Uncanny Connections of Nicks’ Tribute
Stevie Nicks’ “You Can’t Fix This” might have been a tribute to her late godson, Glen Parrish Jr., but the song had clear connections to her own life—and, later, the lives of the other musicians who helped write the ode. As she told the crowd in 2013, she was no stranger to drugs. Indeed, the history of her former band, Fleetwood Mac, is practically synonymous with cocaine and alcohol abuse.
She seems to reference these times in the song’s first verse: We don’t talk much about it. It goes back to many years. All the times we almost didn’t make it, we stayed clear, Nicks sings. Dancing with the devil, call it respect, call it fear, but we never allowed the devil to come to the party. The devil, in this case, was a euphemism for harder drugs like heroin. Given Nicks’ history of drug use, her song becomes a heartbreaking look at two sides of addiction: those who survive, and those who don’t.
The song also gains deeper meaning when one considers the fate of its co-writers. Nicks might have written the original poem, but she employed the help of Dave Grohl, Rami Jaffee, and Taylor Hawkins to turn it into a song. Tragically, Taylor Hawkins would die of a lethal combination of opioids, benzodiazepines, depressants, and THC in 2022, nine years after they released “You Can’t Fix This.”
Nicks’ lines in the chorus become all the more poignant when one thinks about the many ways this song pertains to her life: You can’t fix this, she implores in the refrain. You lost a friend. Hearts breaking right and left, friendships break like glass, and the devil pours another glass.
Photo by John Angelillo/UPI/Shutterstock
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