The Fleetwood Mac song Mick Fleetwood called a “nightmare” to play
Of course, in structure and linear forms, we find the most unique kind of beauty. But within the chaos of artistic endeavour, we can see the very essence of humanity. The peak period of Fleetwood Mac tended to be a beautiful mess.
For as long as the band may have been able to make classic tunes, they were often borne out of pain, with each member creating material about their significant others when cutting the tracks on Rumours. While the sessions for their magnum opus were complicated, things were about to get even more heated when working on the album Tusk.
Now having a budget to do whatever they wanted, Fleetwood Mac set up shop playing whatever came to mind, with each principal songwriter retreating into different corners. In essence, most of the album mirrors what The Beatles did on The White Album, with everyone being used as sidemen on each other’s records.
Then again, none of the tracks were going to be easy to record. Between working on the wild experiments that Lindsey Buckingham had brought into the camp, Mick Fleetwood wasn’t thrilled about working on Stevie Nicks’ ballad ‘Sara’.
Inspired by her unborn child after going through with an abortion, the ballad is still among Nicks’ best, as she sings about her lover staying with her just for a little while longer. Despite having an excellent foundation for a song, Fleetwood had the most challenging time trying to match the energy that the track needed.
Being one of the foundations of the group since the 1960s, Fleetwood was already known for his finesse as a powerhouse drummer in the British blues scene. Once they decided to transition into mellower music with Nicks and Buckingham, though, the need to serve the song got a lot more complicated for him.
When talking about the recording, Fleetwood went into detail about how difficult it was trying to keep his drums at the right volume, telling Classic Rock Stories, “Stevie brought the song to the studio as a piano track, and I worked for days, sweating bullets to put the time to it. The softness required was a drummer’s nightmare but a great challenge. In the end, it took three days to get the brushwork to accompany the vocal.”
This was far from the first time Fleetwood struggled to get the right take of one of their songs, either. During the recording of Rumours, Fleetwood was known to slave over the drums for hours until he finally landed on the off-kilter beat that appears in ‘Go Your Own Way’.
What was Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Sara’ about?
In an interview with The Tommy Vance Show, Stevie Nicks revealed: “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.”
Nicks continued: “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.”
However, for a long time, the song was rumoured to be about Henley, who even spoke to GQ about ‘Sara’ in 1991. He said: “I believe to the best of my knowledge [Nicks] became pregnant by me. 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. 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.’”
Nicks was angry when she found out that Henley had so openly discussed such private topics with the media, although she revealed in a 2014 interview with Billboard that his claims were partly true. She said: “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara. But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”
The sound of ‘Sara’ was only a drop in the bucket for what the rest of Tusk had to offer, though. As much as the band may have been working on getting just the right tracks with an ever-expanding budget, the double album experience ended up being one of the messier affairs in their catalogue, with Buckingham even recording a handful of the backing vocals for the album while doing pushups in the studio.
Regardless of how long he worked on it, Fleetwood considers the song one of the emblematic tracks of that time, recalling, “The result was, in many ways, the ultimate Fleetwood Mac song of that era, the late 1970s: breathless, ethereal, almost ecclesiastical and somehow reverent, as Stevie pays tribute to her muse.”
