“Blame it on my wild heart”: The songs Stevie Nicks wrote about Don Henley
Whenever Stevie Nicks writes in her journal, she documents her day-to-day on the right side and reserves the left side for poetry. This means she is constantly in the romantic mix of creative flow, surging forward, knowing that her past affairs are safe in the hands of immortalised pages. Romance, for somebody like Nicks, extends far beyond the confines of a man, influencing her every mood as the days breeze by.
Romanticism has been such an integral part of Nicks’ career from the beginning, her appreciation for the more basic aspects of life providing the perfect canvas for artistic freedom. “[It’s] the halcyon days or, just, remember the way that the air felt on your skin, or the way your hair felt when the wind blew through it, or the way that the trees sounded, or that kind of thing,” she told The New Yorker, her ability to appreciate every single edge of life long debunking her simplistic connections to basic romantic endeavours.
But the truth is that Nicks’ relationships have been just one part of her artistry, yet they are often the most discussed, or worse, scrutinised. Her past partnerships and the way she navigated some of life’s darkest challenges have deeply influenced her art; that much is undisputable, but it often occurs much like ducks gliding through a pond, occasionally emerging to dry off, only to dive back in and immerse themselves again in the unpredictable journey of existence.
Lindsey Buckingham was one of her most significant guiding principles, especially in the beginning when her main source of nourishment was the idea that one day, yes, they would make it. Through the bristling thorns of time, however, her path became both enlightened and tainted by a handful of others who pricked her finger, drawing blood that would blend with the ink of her lyrics, much like the left side of her heart-filled journal.
For a little while, it was Don Henley. At its best, they influenced each others’ hearts and creative minds, the passion of sharing and creating art together in the same space appearing as exciting as pretty much anything. For a little while, it was Henley’s hands she wrapped around her heart, the beautiful embellishment of a romance destined to be brief igniting her own lyricism with a certain orange ember.
So when Waylon Jennings approached her about writing a duet, the prospect seemed as easy as breathing. Nicks would pen words that Jennings would sing, with her relationship with Henley peering from his mouth as if they were his own, his own entanglement with his wife a perfect canvas on which to explore a partnership that was far from simple. ‘Leather and Lace’ was always Nicks and Henley’s, long before Jennings and his wife split and the words were placed back into the hands of the original writer.
“Lovers forever, face to face,” Nicks sings, her fleeting love making way for what would forever become one of her favourite memories of all time. “As fate would have it, it became one of the most special love songs that I would ever write and remains that, even today, after all these years,” the singer later reflected. “All in all, it was an unforgettable experience, as was he. Blame it on my wild heart.”
Whenever the fiery blaze of impassioned love clears, the realities of post-haze mysticism clear, and this formed the crux of the earlier hit ‘Sara’. The unpredictability of such a connection is incorporated from the very beginning as Nicks sings, “Wait a minute, baby / Stay with me a while / Said you’d give me the light / But you never told me about the fire.” The dissolution of her relationships might have been enough to write such a heartfelt line, but the pain of making a life-altering decision—aborting Henley’s unborn child—oozes from her voice like a flowing river.
“Drowning in the sea of love,” she sings, “Where everyone would love to drown.” Nicks is honest about how she became swept away in her enamourment, claiming that she was there for a while, “drowning” where everybody wants to be once in a while. However, the “great dark wind within the wings of a storm” seemed almost inevitable, forcing her to now confront the loss of her “match” and the path she might have taken as a mother.
‘Leather and Lace’ and ‘Sara’ might be worlds apart, one being about a love so explosive you can’t see or feel anything else, and the other reflecting on Nicks’ child, who she named Sara, and how she slipped through her fingers through no fault of her own. However, when looked at through Nicks’ signature lens of romanticism and how such events almost always yield poetic inspiration, no matter how tragic, both tracks reveal the mastery of a creative heart which is forever open, no matter how many times she has to piece it back together again.
