The songwriting skills Stevie Nicks has is phenomenal. Taking out her personal traumas and experiences on paper and then, making a song out of it, takes skill. Her discography is filled with personal tracks which define her in various stages of her life.
Some of her songs describe the beauty of falling in love, and some make you remember the toxic, horrible moments with literally your favorite person. She is really good at making everyone romanticize the moments and feelings we once had for people we don’t know now.
Similarly, looks like Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Sara’ is a personal track Stevie ever wrote. The singer captured all her feelings after she was left heartbroken by the infidelity of her bandmate Mick Fleetwood. The song is one of her greatest tracks.
Mick and Stevie never had a normal relationship. It was basically an affair. Nicks was dating Don Henley at that time and no one knew about the problems they were having. The stress they both had because of their working routine was also bad. It resulted in Nicks getting into an affair with Mick Fleetwood. She talked about it with Oprah. She said, “it was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody.”
She even discussed her relationship with Mick in 2009. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, she disclosed she wrote the song, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for him.
“It was definitely about Mick, 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.” She added,
“I always thought he was that character in a lot of ways. 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.”
The meaning behind the song has different speculations. Don Henley talked about it and told GQ, It was about the child she aborted. He believed she was pregnant, and she named the kid Sara. She then had an abortion and wrote a song of the same name to the spirit of the aborted baby. He even added, “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.'”
Stevie also talked about the song on The Tommy Vance Show in 1994. She said, “I remember the night I wrote it. 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.”
“There’s little bits about each one of us in that song and when it had all the other verses it really covered a vast bunch of people. Sara was the kind of song you could fall in love with, because I fell in love with it.”
