Songfacts®:

• I was ready for the Kennedys
  I don't know if it was 1960 or 1963
  Everything was timeless, even me
  I wasn't old, I wasn't young, I was just part of their dream
  A shadow walked with me down the hall, it was Martin Luther King
  
  "Show Them The Way" was inspired by a dream Stevie Nicks had in St. Charles, Illinois, ahead of the 2008 election. The rock icon dreamt she'd been invited to perform at a political benefit attended by some iconic mid-20th-century figures. She recalled to The Los Angeles Times that Martin Luther King, Jr. led her by the arm into a ballroom where she found the Kennedy brothers seated, waiting for her, along with John Lewis.
  
  The dream was so vivid that Nicks wrote a poem the next day based on her reverie and put it to music the day after that.
• After writing "Show Them The Way," Nicks considered recording the song for her 2011 album In Your Dreams, but her band said it didn't fit. So she put it away until 2020, when amid the coronavirus pandemic and racial and political divisions, Nicks started thinking it may be the right time to record it. It was only as she laid the tune down that she realized it is a prayer.
  
  Please God show them the way
  Please God on this day
  Spirits all give us strength
  Peace will come if you really want it
  I think we're just in time to save it
  Please God, oh please God, show them the way
  
  Nicks told The Associated Press that she is asking the Almighty to heal the divisions. "This song is a prayer for people to unite," she explained. "A prayer for people to get together."
• "Show Them the Way" is Nicks' first piece of new music since "Your Hand I Will Never Let It Go," recorded for the 2017 The Book of Henry movie.
• Nicks released two different versions of "Show Them the Way" on October 9, 2020; acoustic piano and full-band. The former Nirvana stickman/Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl plays drums and the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart guitar on the full band version.
• Greg Kurstin (Kelly Clarkson's "What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)," Sia's "Cheap Thrills," Adele's "Hello") co-wrote and produced the track. He also produced Foo Fighters' 2017 album Concrete and Gold.
• Stevie Nicks told ABC Audio she had the dream because back in 2008 she was watching a lot of political documentaries. The singer added that it was "so real... I feel it's probably the only dream I ever had that actually had a beginning, a middle and an end, and I totally remembered every little bit of it."
• Stevie Nicks revealed to Dazed that it was Greg Kurstin who invited Dave Grohl to play on the song.
  
  It was the first time that the Foo Fighter musician had recorded drums in his home. He told Nicks that "he mic'd all the drums, used ProTools, and recorded the drums himself."