Did Don Henley write an Eagles song about Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham?
“Don always treated me very special. He always kinda treated me like we were married,” Stevie Nicks once said. Though her many relationships would occupy a significant chunk of the limelight at the peak of her fame, nothing would have prepared her for the deep and destructive love affair that occurred when she fell for Eagles leader Don Henley.
After nursing a broken heart throughout the recording sessions for Rumours, Nicks entered a brief romantic partnership with Mick Fleetwood, which she later regretted. “Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen,” the singer once admitted, reflecting on the complicated nature of both her life and Fleetwood’s.
However, her flirtatious journey with Henley began in 1977 following Nicks’ split from Fleetwood, in which she enjoyed the dreamlike world Henley exposed her to and the possibilities of living life to the fullest. “They had the Lear jets and the presidential suites long before we did and so I learnt from the best,” she said. “And once you learn to live like that, there’s no going back.”
Although the two would split the following year, they remained good friends, working together on songs like ‘Leather and Lace’. Nicks also wrote ‘Sara’ in the aftermath of her split with Henley, inspired by the child she decided not to have. “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” she told Billboard.
Henley also channelled his feelings towards Nicks into his music, starting a little earlier than their romantic endeavours in 1976 with the coveted album Hotel California. One of the tracks, ‘Life In The Fast Lane’, is said to have been inspired by Nicks’ relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, which isn’t entirely difficult to grasp considering its inclusion of loss and longing.
In the song, Henley tackles the tragic idea of a couple who had everything but lost it because of their lifestyle. Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship proved to be just that, their partying ways and fiery energy providing two detrimental ingredients to an incredibly rocky relationship. Although the Eagles never really confirmed whether they had specific figures in mind at the time of writing, it seems like an indisputable parallel.
“‘Life In The Fast Lane’ kind of expressed the stereotyped LA ‘run around in your Porsche’ 24-hour boogie mode that unfortunately is too true for a lot of people,” Henley explained during an interview with the BBC. “I think it was healthy, though, that we realised that running around and parties and fast cars are really not the answer – it’s kind of a shallow way to approach why we’re on this planet, and it probably came as a band consciousness.”
Although the song seems to play on a slightly more heated level of aggression than what Nicks and Buckingham likely became exposed to, it’s clear that this was also a couple who got lost in the crux of the business, losing themselves in the process: “Eager for action and hot for the game / The coming attraction, the drop of a name / They knew all the right people, they took all the right pills / They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills.”
