3 Songs Stevie Nicks Wrote About Mick Fleetwood

Following the whirlwind success of Fleetwood Mac’s 11th album, Rumours, Stevie Nicks’ personal life started unraveling. By 1977, she started having an affair with bandmate Mick Fleetwood, during the Australian dates of Mac’s Rumours tour. At the time, Fleetwood was married to Pattie Boyd’s sister Jenny Boyd.

“Eventually I fell in love with [Nicks] and it was chaotic,” said Fleetwood in his 2014 autobiography, Play On. “It was on the road, and it was a crazy love affair that went on longer than any of us really remember, probably several years by the end of it.”

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During this time, Nicks also started a relationship with The Eagles‘ Don Henley, which soon became frayed and dissolved after a year or two.

By 1979, Nicks and Fleetwood’s union ended but Fleetwood Mac continued, and Nicks wrote about their relationship in a flurry of songs, two of which made the band’s 1979 double album Tusk. Here’s a look behind three of the songs Nicks penned about her love affair and tumultuous times with Fleetwood.

“Sara” (1979)

Written by Stevie Nicks

Nicks addresses her torn relationship with Fleetwood on the band’s 1979 album Tusk on “Sara.” Once they split, Fleetwood dated and later married Nicks’ friend Sara Recor in 1988. “I knew that Sara would be very popular because I loved writing that song,” said Nicks on The Tommy Vance Show in 1994. “I remember the night I wrote it. I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara [Recor], who was married to Mick Fleetwood.”

Nicks added, “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.”

Drowning
In the sea of love
Where everyone would love to drown
But now it’s gone
It doesn’t matter what for
When you build your house
Then call me home

[RELATED: The Meaning, and Alter Ego, Behind Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ Classic “Sara”]

“Sara” may also be linked to an abortion Nicks had while becoming pregnant with her then-boyfriend Don Henley. In a 1991 interview with GQ, Henley revealed that Nicks had an abortion during their relationship and wanted to name their child Sara. “And she named the kid Sara, and she had an abortion and then wrote the song of the same name to the spirit of the aborted baby,” said Henley. “I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says ‘And when you build your house, call me.’” 

In 2014, Nicks revealed that if she had remained with Henley, and given birth to their child, she would have named her Sara. “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” said Nicks. “But there was another woman in my life named Sara [Recor], who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”

Once released, “Sara” was a hit for Fleetwood Mac, reaching No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Storms” (1979)

Written by Stevie Nicks

Always been a storm says Nicks, reciting a line from “Storms.” The moody ballad also made its way onto Tusk and went deeper into her tear with Fleetwood.

“I wrote about my best friend who moved in with my boyfriend, Mick, and her husband had to call and tell me that,” recalled Nicks in 2022. “Sarah moved in with Mick, I just wanted you to know that.” And I jetted out the back door into the mountains and sat out there for three hours contemplating my future, ’cause, well, I just lost my best friend and I lost Mick, and I’m in a band with Mick, which means I can’t just dump Mick.”

Nicks then pointed out specific lyrics in the song that were about their relationship.

Every night that goes between I feel a little less
As you slowly go away from me
This is only another test
Every night you do not come, your softness fades away
Did I ever really care that much?
Is there anything left to say?
Every hour of fear I spend, my body tries to cry
Living through each empty night, a deadly calm inside.’

Never have I been a blue calm sea
I have always been a storm

“So that came from that,” said Nicks. “And you know what? That’s worth it. That’s worth going through. And then, when you go back to sing those songs, you reattach yourself to what happened. And it’s O.K. because it’s not forever. It’s just for that moment.”

She continues, “So, every time I sing that, I’m sitting up there on that mountain looking down at Doheny Drive in L.A., trying to figure out how I was going to make it through this.”

“Beauty and the Beast” (1991)

Written by Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks’ second solo album The Wild Heart was dedicated to her friend Robin Anderson, who died from Leukemia in 1982. The album was a success for Nicks, who went to No. 5 with the lead single “Stand Back,” while the title track was a song Tom Petty called “Epic.” The Heartbreakers also join Nicks on the song “I Will Run to You,” another song written by Petty.

The Wild Heart then closes on a more orchestrated ballad, inspired by one of Nicks’ favorite movies, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, an adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1757 fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. Though Nicks dedicated the track to Vincent and Catherine, characters from the late 1980s TV series Beauty and the Beast, starring Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton, she wrote her interpretation of the classic tale about Mick Fleetwood.

“It was definitely about Mick, but it’s also based on the 1946 Jean Cocteau movie,” said Nicks. “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.” 

Nicks added, “And also, it matched our story because Mick and I could never be. A, because Mick was married and then divorced and that was not good, and B, because of Fleetwood Mac.”

You’re not a stranger to me
And you are something to see
You don’t even know how to please
You say a lot but you’re unaware how to leave

My darling lives in a world that is not mine
An old child misunderstood out of time
Timeless is the creature who is wise
And timeless is the prisoner in disguise

Oh who is the beauty who the beast
Would you die of grieving when I leave
Two children too blind to see
I would fall in your shadow I believe

[RELATED: The Jean Cocteau-Inspired Ballad Stevie Nicks Wrote for Mick Fleetwood]

“Beauty and the Beast” was released on Nicks’ 1991 compilation Timespace – The Best of Stevie Nicks, and later on her 1998 box set Enchanted, and The Soundstage Sessions in 2009.

“I remember Mick [Fleetwood] and I years later at the Red Rocks ‘Rock A Little’ video,” remembered Nicks. “He had come by himself to play, and he stayed there with me all night (in the rain) to do close-ups; everyone else had left. ‘Who is the beauty, and who is the beast? Which one of you? Have you ever really been able to answer that?’ I have, it took a long time, but I did finally find the answer.” 

Photo: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns