This Holiday Song From 1980 Still Makes Stevie Nicks Cry Years Later

Everyone has a song that pulls at their heartstrings, even famous songwriters like Stevie Nicks.

For Nicks, that song would be “Same Old Lang Syne”, as she shared in an interview with the BBC’s Tracks of My Years. The song, set around Christmastime, was written and recorded by Dan Fogelberg. If you listen, it’s easy to see why it makes the Fleetwood Mac star emotional. It tells the story of two adults who used to be young lovers, meeting in a grocery store years later.

Fogelberg wrote the song about an actual encounter he had with a high school ex-girlfriend in a “Convenient Food Mart.”

Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stole behind her in the frozen foods
And I touched her on the sleeve
She didn’t recognize the face at first
But then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me, and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried.

“To this day, when that song comes on, it makes me cry,” Nicks explained. “Because I think that we have all run into somebody that we absolutely loved a long time ago.”

“And you meet them and you’re older, but that’s when you go ‘Real love never dies,’” she continued. “Because it doesn’t matter that they’re older and it doesn’t matter that they don’t look exactly like they did when they were nineteen. They still have that light that attracted you in the beginning, and you feel that.”

Who Was the Inspiration for “Same Old Lang Syne”?

Years after “Same Old Lang Syne” was released, a woman named Jill Greulich came forward and revealed she was the inspiration for the song. For decades, Greulich had kept quiet, but it was after Fogelberg’s death from prostate cancer in 2007 that she decided to share the truth.

Greulich and Fogelberg both attended Woodruff High School in Peoria, Illinois, went to different colleges, and briefly reunited by chance when they were both in town for Christmas with family. At that point, Greulich was married to another man, as the song shares.

Five years after that encounter, she heard the song for which she was the muse on the radio.

“I’ll always have a place in my heart for Dan,” Greulich told the Peoria Journal Star after his death. “Dan would be a very special person to me, even without the song.”

Photo by: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns