The 3 Songs Stevie Nicks Wrote About Her “Doomed” Relationship With Mick Fleetwood

Most songwriters use their romantic experience to color their craft, but few have finessed it quite as well as Stevie Nicks. Both her work with Fleetwood Mac and her solo material is riddled with songs about exes. Her most famous song inspiration was Lindsey Buckingham, but she also wrote stunning tracks about another in-band relationship with Mick Fleetwood. Revisit the three songs she wrote for the namesake member below.

Videos by American Songwriter

The Songs Stevie Nicks Wrote About Mick Fleetwood

Nicks and Buckingham are typically the talking points when it comes to Fleetwood Mac and relationships. Still, Nicks and Fleetwood also had an entanglement that produced a prolific streak in the songwriter.

Both Nicks and Fleetwood have described their relationship as “Chaotic,” or a similar term. It was messy for both of them; it ruined their relationships with others and didn’t do wonders for their collaboration either.

“Eventually I fell in love with [Nicks] and it was chaotic, 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,” Fleetwood once said of their relationship. At the same time, Nicks called it “a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody.”

Nicks’ Songs About Her Relationship With Fleetwood

During their time together, Nicks wrote several songs about her bandmate, the most famous being “Storms.” Every night you do not come / Your softness fades away, Nicks sings in this self-described “fu** you” to Fleetwood.

“Here’s that song in a nutshell: Don’t break up other people’s marriages,” Nick once said. “It will never work and will haunt you for the rest of your miserable days.”

“Oh, that one was a – excuse my language – fu**-you to Mick,” Nicks added elsewhere. “I sat at my piano, a feminist woman, and I wrote it, to say that nothing you or anybody else can do to me can change the fact that, as the opening line goes: Every night that goes between / I feel a little less.”

She also penned one of her most famous efforts, “Sara,” for Fleetwood and the woman he cheated on her with, and “Beauty and the Beast,” which was meant to mirror the way she saw their dynamic.

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

Though Buckingham will always be Nicks’ splashiest relationship in Fleetwood Mac, fans can’t deny the color Fleetwood gave her songwriting either.

(Photo by MPIRock/MediaPunch via Getty Images)