‘Beauty and the Beast’: The song Stevie Nicks wrote about her love affair with Mick Fleetwood
If you know Fleetwood Mac’s music, you probably also know about the drama and disagreements that spawned it. When they weren’t penning soft rock classics like ‘Dreams’ and sprawling all-time greats like ‘The Chain’, the members of Fleetwood Mac were struggling to mediate their romantic entanglements behind the scenes.
The aptly titled Rumours seemed to mark the height of those turbulent times, born out of divorce and drug use. It contained a number of songs the band members had penned about their internal issues, including Lindsey Buckingham’s dig at Stevie Nicks following their breakup, ‘Go Your Own Way’. But Rumours wasn’t the only record to chart the band’s entanglements.
Their internal issues continued to inspire songs beyond Rumours, even beyond the work of Fleetwood Mac. When Nicks embarked upon a solo career, her breakup with Buckingham and her brief love affair with Mick Fleetwood continued to find their way into her writing, the latter spawning a song called ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
Encapsulating all the fairytale drama of the film it took its name from, the song featured on Nicks’ second record, The Wild Heart. The instrumentation pairs grand strings with soft keys, while Nicks’ vocals soar above them both. In her words, Nicks borrows from the story of Jean Cocteau’s film to reflect her relationship with Fleetwood.
Nicks and Fleetwood had watched the film together, and the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman drew comparisons between her short-term lover and the beast. “He’s so tall and he had beautiful coats down to here,” she told Entertainment Weekly, but she also noticed a resemblance to their own romance.
“It matched our story because Mick and I could never be,” she acknowledged. The affair would devastate their fellow bandmate and Nicks’ ex, Buckingham, and also occurred while Fleetwood was still married. It was a horrendous decision all round, but one that the pair made nonetheless.
She penned ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as an amalgamation of their film’s plot and their own love story. “My love is a man who’s not been tamed,” she sings over the grandiose soundscapes, “Oh my love lives in a world of false pleasure and pain.” Her words are steeped in real emotion, contemplating the chaos and heartbreak her affair with Fleetwood would bring to those around them.
Her lyrics walk the line between fiction and reality, as she affords her story all the drama of Cocteau’s direction. Her words seem to acknowledge the destruction their relationship will cause, noting that she and her lover come from different worlds, and yet she can’t quite pull herself away.
By the end of the song, she repeats the phrases “my beauty” and “la bête” over and over, struggling to untangle his beauty from his beast-like nature. Gorgeous keys bring the song to an end as Nicks’ voice sounds on the verge of tears, whispering, “beautiful beast.”
Between the fictional inspiration of Cocteau’s film and the influence of Nicks’ real-life love affair, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is one of the most theatrical songs in her catalogue. It’s a far cry from her soft rock stylings with Fleetwood Mac, but it’s infused with all the same drama and deliberation.
Listen to ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the song Stevie Nicks wrote about her love affair with Mick Fleetwood, below.
