The life of a rockstar is never dull, especially if you’re Stevie Nicks. While on the Rumours tour, and during the making of Tusk, from 1977 to 1979, the starlet engaged in a complicated affair with Mick Fleetwood, who was married to Jenny Boyd at the time. Here are three songs Nicks wrote about her relationship with the drummer.
“24 Karat Gold”
This song was actually written during the making of Bella Donna, but didn’t end up on Nick’s debut solo album. It’s a tragic song, and it’s most certainly inspired by Fleetwood.
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“’24 Karat Gold’ was inspired by Mick Fleetwood about our relationship. Even though it’s kind of a sad, crazy song, I’m so glad it all happened so I could write that song,” she said in a Q&A on Facebook in 2014.
According to Nicks, Fleetwood was a collector of gold jewelry, specifically of a yellow gold color. Nicks became inspired to start collecting her own pieces through him.
Of her record, 24 Karat Gold: Songs From The Vault, Nicks explained: “That’s why I named the record ’24 Karat Gold’ because it’s like my pieces of jewellery that are special to me in my collection.”
“Sara”
Originally 16 minutes long, “Sara” pays tribute to a chaotic period in Nicks’ life. The singer has cited Fleetwood as being “the reason” for this particular track. The band’s drummer ended up dating her then-best friend, Sara Recor, whom he eventually married in 1988.
Even though Recor was the namesake for this song, Nicks has admitted that it’s really about multiple people. Of the night she wrote the song, she shared:
“I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. She likes to think it’s completely about her, but it’s really not completely about her. It’s about me, about her, about Mick, about Fleetwood Mac. It’s about all of us at that point.”
“Beauty And The Beast”
On her album The Wild Heart, Nicks addresses the parallels between her relationship with Fleetwood and a classic fairy tale in “Beauty And The Beast”. She used the movie adaptation of the story by Jean Cocteau for inspiration.
“It was definitely about Mick,” she explained of the song to Entertainment Weekly. “But it’s also based on the 1946 Jean Cocteau movie. I first saw it on TV one night when Mick and I were first together, and I always thought of Mick as being sort of ‘Beauty And The Beast’-esque, because he’s so tall and he had beautiful coats down to here, and clothes made by little fairies up in the attic, I always thought, so he was that character in a lot of ways.”
Photo by: Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images
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